Context-dependent control of attention capture: Evidence from proportion congruent effects.

Abstract

There are several independent demonstrations that attentional phenomena can be controlled in a context-dependent manner by cues associated with differing attentional control demands. The present set of experiments provide converging evidence that attention-capture phenomena can be modulated in a context-dependent fashion. We determined whether methods from the proportion congruent literature (listwide and item- and context-specific proportion congruent designs) that are known to modulate distractor interference effects in Stroop and flanker tasks are capable of modulating attention capture by salient feature singletons. Across experiments we found evidence that attention capture can be modulated by listwide, item-specific, and context-specific manipulations of proportion congruent. We discuss challenges associated with interpreting results from proportion congruent studies but propose that our findings converge with existing work that has demonstrated context-dependent control of attention capture. (PsycINFO Database Record

From Controlled to Automatic Processes and Back Again: The Role of Contextual Features

“…The difference between the performance in the target shift and in the intermixed task reveals that the benefits of automation are higher and more significant when the subject was presented the contextual-cue. These results are in line with literature on context-specific proportion congruent effects showing evidence for flexible transfer of context-specific control across different items (Bugg & Crump, 2012;Crump, Brosowsky, & Milliken, 2016;Crump & Logan, 2010;Crump & Milliken, 2009;Crump, Milliken, Leboe-Mcgowan, Leboe-Mcgowan, & Gao, 2018).…”

The transfer of location-based control requires location-based conflict

“…First, typical LSPC effects were seen with the Stroop task at the biased training locations. We note that this is also the first demonstration of location-specific control with "intact" Stroop stimuli (i.e., response relevant color information appearing in the word; other researchers employing the Stroop task have presented the word and color patch independently in space and time; Crump et al, 2006, Crump et al, 2008, Crump & Milliken, 2009Crump et al, 2018). Secondly, there was no evidence of the transfer of these effects to nearby novel locations as had been found in Fig.…”

Cortical and subcortical contributions to context-control learning

“…Taken together, the studies reviewed above provide compelling evidence that specific contextual cues, be they stimulus locations, features or individual items (identities), as well as temporal episodes, can become associated with particular conflict control settings and trigger them in a cue-driven, bottom-up manner. Importantly, though, context-control learning is not limited to conflict-control in Stroop-type tasks, as equivalent effects have also been documented in tasks that probe other components of cognitive control or attention, including task-switching (e.g., Crump and Logan, 2010;Leboe et al, 2008), response inhibition (e.g., Verbruggen and Logan, 2008), dual-tasking (e.g., Fischer et al, 2014;Surrey et al, 2017), Simon task (e.g., Hübner and Mishra, 2016) and attention capture (e.g., Crump et al, 2018). For instance, switch costs -longer response times and lower accuracy when one has to switch rather than to repeat a task set -are thought to reflect control processes of reconfiguring a task-set (Rogers & Monsell, 1995) and/or overcoming interference from a previous set (Allport, Styles, & Hsieh, 1994).…”