Abstract
The congruency effect in distracter interference (e.g., Stroop) tasks is often reduced after incongruent trials, relative to congruent trials. It has been proposed that this congruency sequence effect (CSE) results from trial-by-trial adjustments of attention, which are triggered by changes in response conflict, expectancy, or negative affect. Hence, a large literature has developed to investigate the source(s) of attention adaptation in distracter interference tasks. Recent work, however, suggests that CSEs may stem from feature integration and/or contingency learning processes that are confounded with congruency sequence in the vast majority of distracter interference tasks. By combining an established method for measuring CSEs in the absence of these learning and memory confounds with a prime-probe task, we observed robust CSEs in two experiments. These findings provide strong evidence of CSEs independent of learning and memory confounds, which might be explainable by trial-by-trial adjustments of attention. They also reveal a highly effective approach for observing CSEs independent of the typical confounds, which will facilitate future studies of how people adapt to distraction.
Highlights
Distracter interference tasks are widely employed to investigate selective attention
Prior findings from the prime-probe task are inconclusive due to mental rotation confounds, and prior data from the color flanker task suggest that two tasks must share common brain mechanisms and response modes for a congruency sequence effect (CSE) to emerge. Since it is less certain whether a CSE can be observed independent of the typical learning and memory confounds in the prime-probe task than in the color flanker task, we focused on the prime-probe task in the present study
Unlike prior findings from the Stroop, flanker, and Simon tasks indicating that CSEs are eliminated after controlling for such confounds [11,16], the present findings are encouraging for the class of accounts suggesting that some form of attention adaptation may contribute to CSEs in the prime-probe arrow task
Summary
Distracter interference tasks are widely employed to investigate selective attention. In such tasks, participants are instructed to identify a relevant item in the presence of one or more distracters that engender either the same response as the relevant item (congruent trials) or a different response (incongruent trials). In the Simon task [3], participants are asked to identify a relevant item’s color by making a lateralized response (e.g., left) independent of the item’s spatial location (e.g., left in congruent trials, right in incongruent trials). A ubiquitous finding in such tasks is that performance is worse in incongruent than in congruent trials. This ‘‘congruency,’’ or ‘‘interference,’’ effect indicates that selective attention often fails to suppress irrelevant stimuli
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