Context, not conflict, drives cognitive control.

Abstract

Theories of cognitive control generally assume that perceived conflict acts as a signal to engage inhibitory mechanisms that suppress subsequent conflicting information. Crucially, an absence of conflict is not regarded as being a relevant signal for cognitive control. Using a Cueing, a Priming, and a Simon task, we provide evidence that conflict does not have this unique signal status: Encountering a conflict does not lead to behavioral adjustments on subsequent conflict trials, whereas encountering a non-conflict trial does lead to behavioral adjustments on subsequent nonconflict trials. We propose that this apparent role-reversal can be explained by a mechanism that responds to both the presence and the absence of conflict, down-regulating the visuo-motor system following conflict, and up-regulating it following non-conflict.

Long-term response-stimulus associations can influence distractor-response bindings

“…Yet, the same pattern as in the present experiment can be seen in their Figure 2: The pattern of distractor-response binding was more pronounced if trial n - 1 was compatible than if it was incompatible. In contrast to the study by Schlaghecken and Martini (2012), the general effect of conflict repetition benefit in our experiment was larger for incompatible-incompatible sequences than for compatible-compatible sequences, F (1, 56) = 6.11, p = .017, η p 2 = .10. An obvious difference between the studies is the participants’ task: The authors of the cited study analyzed cuing-, priming-, and Simon-tasks, while we used a flanker task.…”

“…The current result pattern is also similar to the results obtained by Schlaghecken and Martini (2012), who investigated behavioral adjustments after conflict and non-conflict trials. As in the present experiment, the authors orthogonally varied response and distractor-feature relation but interpreted the latter as trial type relation.…”

Even with time, conflict adaptation is not made of expectancies

“…The dissociation found in Jiménez and Méndez (2013) between explicit expectancies and long-range conflict adaptation effects was interpreted by the authors as indicating that explicit predictions would not be affecting performance in speeded conditions, but that the observed adaptation effects would reflect an inertial adaptation to the amount of conflict (or lack of conflict) experienced over the last few trials, which would improve responding to those trials which make analogous control demands to those made by the series of previous trials (see also Lamers and Roelofs, 2011; Schlaghecken and Martini, 2012, for similar conclusions) 2 . However, given that this pattern of results had been obtained in conditions which minimized the chances of developing and exploiting any explicit prediction, and in which those expectancies were measured over independent blocks, differing widely in their temporal arrangement with respect to the regular Stroop blocks, we set to conceptually replicate these results under temporal conditions which may leave enough room for strategic processes to operate.…”

Epistemic inclination and factualization: a synchronic and diachronic study on the semantic gradience of factuality

“…Norman & Shallice, 1986 ;Desimone & Duncan, 1995 ;Botvinick, Braver, Barch, Carter, & Cohen, 2001 ;Miller & Cohen, 2001 ;Schlaghecken & Martini 2012 ; see also Kan et al, 2013 ). As shown in Figure 1 , the control cycle (Langacker 1990a(Langacker , 2008(Langacker , 2009) includes four stages: a baseline, a potential, an action, and a result stage.…”