Who is more flexible?—Awareness of changing context but not working memory capacity modulates inhibitory control

Abstract

The present study examines how a person's working memory capacity (WMC) and awareness of change in context influences modulating inhibitory control. Context was manipulated by changing the predictive validity of a prime to a following target (i.e., the proportion of prime repetition) across three phases in a single-prime negative priming task. The prime was a distractor for the following target when the proportion was 25% (in the first and third phases) and a useful cue when the proportion rose to 75% (in the second phase). Participants' WMCs were measured and whether they were aware of the change of the prime-repetition proportion was determined in interviews at the end of the experiment. We found that when the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) was short (Experiment 1), participants aware of the change of prime-repetition proportion showed a null negative priming effect when the contingency increased from 25% to 75%, and then rebooted the effect when it decreased back to 25%, thus indicating an ability to modulate inhibitory control as context varied. In contrast, the unaware participants kept inhibiting primes all the time. When SOA was long (Experiment 2), participants with awareness even showed a positive priming effect when the prime-repetition proportion increased. Surprisingly, participants' WMCs did not matter except for the conscious strategy used in the long-SOA condition. This is the first study simultaneously investigating how WMC and awareness can affect people's ability to modulate inhibitory control and reveals that awareness plays a more direct role in such modulation than does WMC.