A cow on the prairie vs. a cow on the street: long-term consequences of semantic conflict on episodic encoding

Abstract

Long-term effects of cognitive conflict on performance are not as well understood as immediate effects. We used a change detection task to explore long-term consequences of cognitive conflict by manipulating the congruity between a changing object and a background scene. According to conflict-based accounts of memory formation, incongruent trials (e.g., a cow on the street), in spite of hindering immediate performance, should promote stronger encoding than congruent trials (e.g., a cow on a prairie). Surprisingly, across three experiments we show that semantic incongruity actually impairs remembering of the information presented during scene processing. This set of results is incompatible with the frequently accepted hypothesis of conflict-triggered learning. Rather, we discuss the present data and other studies previously reported in the literature in the light of two much older hypotheses of memory formation: the desirable difficulty and the levels of processing principles.

Increasing control improves further control, but it does not enhance memory for the targets in a face–word Stroop task

“…Lastly, and perhaps more interestingly, manipulations of congruency at the item level, which undoubtedly imply learning about specific items, still did not affect our participants' ability to recognize old items in any differential way. The absence of statistically significant differences when using null hypothesis significance testing, together with the use of Bayesian statistics to assess the likelihood of a null result in the presence of a true effect, greatly supports the claim that conflict at encoding does not directly lead to a better encoding of the target information (see Muhmenthaler & Meier, 2019;Ortiz-Tudela et al, 2016;Ortiz-Tudela et al, 2018;Ptok, Thomson, Humphreys, & Watter, 2019, for similar findings). Several accounts of cognitive control depict LWPCE and CSE as a reinstatement of a previous response set linked with specific stimulus features.…”

“…The hypothesis of conflict-enhanced memory has been recently examined through several studies using different paradigms (Krebs, Boehler, De Belder, & Egner, 2015;Ortiz-Tudela, Milliken, Botta, LaPointe, & Lupiañez, 2016;Ortiz-Tudela, Milliken, Jiménez, & Lupiáñez, 2018;Rosner, D'Angelo, MacLellan, & Milliken, 2015a). For instance, Krebs et al (2015) used a face-word Stroop task, in which participants were asked to respond to the gender of a given set of faces that were overlaid with a distracting word (i.e., "MAN" or "WOMAN").…”

Congruency Encoding Effects on Recognition Memory: A Stage-Specific Account of Desirable Difficulty

“…More simply, our conflict condition makes participants do more high-level attentional work, and in our semantic priming conditions, this work is directly focused on the meaning or essential category information of the stimulus itself. In contrast, in the change blindness studies (Ortiz-Tudela et al., 2017, 2018), the incongruent condition provides a strong automatic (and presumably rapid, pre-volitional) cue, both that something does not match, and also possibly a spatial cue to where the contextually inappropriate object is in the scene. In this case, it is the congruent condition that requires more deliberate attentional work and controlled processing to find the changing object.…”

“…A more stage- and process-specific approach to considering conflict effects on memory may also help us align other recent findings in this emerging literature. Several recent studies (Ortiz-Tudela et al., 2017, 2018) have shown what on the surface appears to be an opposite memory effect of incongruency for objects displayed in congruent versus incongruent background scene contexts – incongruent items were quicker to be identified and localized (though with more error) in a change detection task, but showed worse later memory compared to congruent items. The authors discuss their findings as being at odds with theories of conflict-elicited learning (Verguts and Notebaert, 2008, 2009), but compatible with more general principles such as desirable difficulty or depth of processing.…”

Attentional influences on memory formation: A tale of a not-so-simple story

“…One such factor is that the direct connection between incongruity and prediction error, at least in the studies outlined above, is not straightforward. A second factor of note is that it is relatively easy to find sets of data in the literature that support a putatively contrary principle, that is, that structured, consistent, congruent information is remembered better than incongruent information (Ortiz-Tudela, Milliken, Botta, LaPointe, & Lupiañez, 2016;van Kesteren et al, 2012). Lastly, another factor worth noting is that, in most of the studies described above, the manipulations included at study necessarily imply a processing difficulty that is confounded with the expectation mismatch itself.…”