Adjustments to recent and frequent conflict reflect two distinguishable mechanisms

Exploring Conflict- and Target-Related Movement of Visual Attention

“…This has the advantage of ruling out alternative nonattentional accounts based on confounds of the congruency level sequence and the sequence of specific stimulus and response features (e.g., Hommel, Proctor, & Vu, 2004) or of congruency level frequency and the frequency of specific stimulus and response features (e.g., Stürmer , Leuthold, Soetens, Schröter, & Sommer, 2002;Wendt & Luna-Rodriguez, 2009). 2 This discrepancy accords with other recently found dissociations of ratio and sequential modulations (e.g., Fernandez-Duque & Knight, 2008;Funes, Lupiáñez, & Humphreys, 2010;Iani, Rubichi, Gherri, & Nicoletti, 2009;Purmann, Badde, & Wendt, 2009 the side of previous incongruent than on the side of previous congruent flankers. Effects of presenting a search task target stimulus at the location of a previous distractor has mainly been investigated in localization tasks (e.g., Milliken, Tipper, Houghton, & Lupiáñez, 2000;Tipper, Brehaut, & Driver, 1990).…”

Adaptation to recent conflict in the classical color-word Stroop-task mainly involves facilitation of processing of task-relevant information

“…Quite to the contrary, evidence raising doubt on this assumption is accumulating. Additionally to the similarities and differences already mentioned, it has been found in behavioral studies that while frequency effects can be shown in an early phase of motor responses (i.e., movement initiation), recency effects seem to be confined to later phases (Purmann et al, 2009), recency effects disappeared after controlling for feature integration effects, frequency effects were still present (Fernandez-Duque and Knight, 2008), and that while recency effects vanished over the course of the experiment, frequency effects can be found even at the end of the experiment (Mayr and Awh, 2009). Our data further calls the assumption of a “one-fits-all” mechanism into question: If adaptation to recent conflict is implemented by strengthening the current task-set, then studies on task-set implementation should not show suppression of processing of task-irrelevant information.…”

Orchestrating Proactive and Reactive Mechanisms for Filtering Distracting Information: Brain-Behavior Relationships Revealed by a Mixed-Design fMRI Study

“…Sustained (blockrelated) activity was modeled by entering boxcar-shaped regressors (Pure, 20% Inc, 60% Inc), including the temporal derivative. Transient (event-related) activity was modeled by using a finite impulse-response (FIR) model (Dale, 1999;Ollinger et al, 2001;Visscher et al, 2003). The seven event types (identified with the following abbreviations TrialType_BlockType: Abs_Pure, Abs_20% Inc, Cong_20% Inc, Inc_20% Inc, Abs_60% Inc, Cong_60% Inc, Inc_60% Inc) were modeled with 10 time points, 1.5 s apart (i.e., the TR), starting 3 s before stimulus onset and terminating 10.5 s after onset.…”

“…Moreover, when to-be-ignored distracters occur frequently, a sustained filtering mechanism can be implemented (i.e., proactively) throughout experimental blocks. Accordingly, two forms of proactive control of distraction can be distinguished: those that are implemented before an expected distraction, but not sustained across trials ("phasic" proactive control; Oliveira et al, 2014), and those that can be sustained across multiple trials (Braver et al, 2009;Marini et al, 2013;"tonic" proactive control). However, relatively limited work has specifically investigated such sustained distraction filtering (for reviews of proactive and reactive cognitive control, see Aron, 2011;Braver, 2012).…”