Abstract
Over the last two decades, the congruency sequence effect (CSE) –the finding of a reduced congruency effect following incongruent trials in conflict tasks– has played a central role in advancing research on cognitive control. According to the influential conflict-monitoring account, the CSE reflects adjustments in selective attention that enhance task focus when needed, often termed conflict adaptation. However, this dominant interpretation of the CSE has been called into question by several alternative accounts that stress the role of episodic memory processes: feature binding and (stimulus-response) contingency learning. To evaluate the notion of conflict adaptation in accounting for the CSE, we construed versions of three widely used experimental paradigms (the colour-word Stroop, picture-word Stroop and flanker task) that effectively control for feature binding and contingency learning. Results revealed that a CSE can emerge in all three tasks. This strongly suggests a contribution of attentional control to the CSE and highlights the potential of these unprecedentedly clean paradigms for further examining cognitive control.
Highlights
The last two decades have witnessed a remarkable increase in psychologists’ interest in cognitive control – our ability to flexibly adjust to an ever-changing environment in order to pursue internal goals or to comply with external task demands
For each task we ran a mixed-design analysis of variance (ANOVA) with the within-subjects factors Previous Congruency and Current Congruency and the between-subjects factor Task Order on the mean reaction times (RTs) and percentages of errors (PEs)
We report strong evidence for a congruency sequence effect (CSE) in three adapted conflict paradigms that, for the first time, effectively controlled for each of the episodic memory confounds reported in the literature
Summary
The last two decades have witnessed a remarkable increase in psychologists’ interest in cognitive control – our ability to flexibly adjust to an ever-changing environment in order to pursue internal goals or to comply with external task demands. In order to control for effects of feature integration, researchers expanded the stimulus set of their conflict tasks and restricted the analysis to a specific subset of trials in which feature overlap was absent [14,15,16,17] or kept equal [18]. One such combination of word-colour pairings would consistently cross relevant and irrelevant features between incongruent trial pairs (e.g., ‘RED’ in green and ‘GREEN’ in red) As this would introduce unwanted contingencies, this stimulus set was not used. The randomization obeyed to the exact same constraints as in the Stroop task described above
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