Abstract
Once Bitten, Twice Shy: On the Transient Nature of Congruency Sequence Effects
Highlights
To explore adaptive cognitive control to resolve situations of interference and response conflict, as in the soccer example, few tasks in the toolkit have been as illustrious as the Stroop task (Stroop, 1935) named after its creator, John Ridley Stroop (1897–1973)
In the Stroop task and similar conflict tasks, these adaptive sequential effects are revealed by two patterns: (i) faster incongruent responses and slower congruent responses after incongruent trials as well as (ii) faster congruent responses and slower incongruent responses after congruent trials (Figure 1A)
Adaptation occurs after conflict per se, but depends on the congruency of the previous trial: (i) if the going gets tough, the tough get going, and (ii) if the going gets easy, the gates are opened
Summary
To explore adaptive cognitive control to resolve situations of interference and response conflict, as in the soccer example, few tasks in the toolkit have been as illustrious as the Stroop task (Stroop, 1935) named after its creator, John Ridley Stroop (1897–1973). Answers to incongruent stimuli (e.g., BLUE) generally take longer and are less accurate because of the strong tendency to read the word and mistakenly say “blue” instead of “red.” This performance difference is called the congruency effect and its magnitude is widely used to study how well individuals can resist interference. As a more theory-neutral term, we adopt the operational term congruency sequence effect (CSE), following Egner et al (2010).
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