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

Jiménez, Luís; Méndez, Cástor; Agra, Oscar; Ortiz-Tudela, Javier

doi:10.3758/s13421-020-01028-2

Cited by 8 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…A somewhat related literature has assessed incidental memory for the actual task stimuli in Stroop-type paradigms, with rather mixed results. Here, some studies have shown that participants can better remember incidentally encoded incongruent relative to congruent target stimuli, suggesting that conflict can enhance memory (Davis et al, 2019;Krebs et al, 2015;Ptok et al, 2019;Ptok et al, 2020;, while others have found null results or worse memory for incongruent targets (Jiménez et al, 2020;Ortiz-Tudela et al, 2017). Moreover, there is debate on whether putative memory enhancements may be driven by response conflict or semantic conflict (Muhmenthaler & Meier, 2019;Ptok et al, 2019;Ptok et al, 2020).…”

Section: Subsequent Memory Effectsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Evaluating the learning of stimulus-control associations through incidental memory of reinforcement events.

Bejjani

Egner²

2021

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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Cognitive control describes the ability to use internal goals to strategically guide how we process and respond to our environment. Changes in the environment lead to adaptation in control strategies. This type of control-learning can be observed in performance adjustments in response to varying proportions of easy to hard trials over blocks of trials on classic control tasks. Known as the list-wide proportion congruent (LWPC) effect, increased difficulty is met with enhanced attentional control. Recent research has shown that motivational manipulations may enhance the LWPC effect, but the underlying mechanisms are not yet understood. We manipulated Stroop proportion congruency over blocks of trials and after each trial, provided participants with either performance-contingent feedback ("correct/incorrect") or non-contingent feedback ("response logged") above trial-unique, task-irrelevant images (reinforcement events). The LWPC task was followed by a surprise recognition memory task, which allowed us to test whether attention to feedback (incidental memory for the images) varies as a function of proportion congruency, time, performance-contingency, and individual differences. We replicated a robust LWPC effect in a large sample (N = 402), but observed no differences in behavior between feedback groups. Importantly, the memory data revealed better encoding of feedback images from context-defining trials (e.g., congruent trials in a mostly congruent block), especially early in a new context, and in congruent conditions. Individual differences in reward and punishment sensitivity were not strongly associated with control-learning effects. These results suggest that statistical learning of contextual demand may have a larger impact on control-learning than individual differences in motivation.

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Section: Subsequent Memory Effectsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Evaluating the learning of stimulus-control associations through incidental memory of reinforcement events.

Bejjani

Egner²

2021

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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“…In Jiménez et al (2020, Experiment 2), for instance, participants responded to the gender of faces which were repeatedly presented with an overlaid word that could be either congruent or incongruent with the required response (i.e., the words male or female ). As in the present experiments, the authors found clear evidence indicating that the repetition of distracter–target pairs speeded up performance, producing larger congruency effects for those faces which were most frequently paired with a congruent distracter, relative to those faces which were mostly associated with an incongruent distracter.…”

Section: The Interaction Between Conflict and Memory And/or Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Proportion of conflict, contingency learning, and recency effects in a Stroop task

Jiménez

Gallego

Agra

et al. 2021

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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Recent research on the relation between learning and cognitive control has assumed that conflict modulates learning, either by increasing arousal and hence improving learning in high conflict situations (Verguts & Notebaert, 2008), or by inducing control, and hence inhibiting the processing of distracters and their eventual association with the imperative responses (Whitehead et al., 2018). We analyze whether the amount of conflict, manipulated through the proportion of congruency in a set of Stroop inducer trials, affects learning of contingencies established on diagnostic trials composed by neutral words associated with color responses. The results reproduced the list-wide proportion of congruency effect on the inducer trials, and showed evidence of contingency learning on the diagnostic trials, but provided no indication that this learning was modulated by the level of conflict. Specific analyses conducted to control for the impact of episodic effects on the expression of learning indicated that contingency effects were not driven by the incremental processes that could be expected by associative learning, but rather they were due to the impact of the most recent trial involving the same distracter. Accordingly, these effects disappeared when tested selectively on trials that required a non-matching response with respect to the previous occurrence of the distracter. We interpret this result in the context of the debate on how learning and memory interact with the processes of cognitive control.

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“…In a replication attempt, Jiménez et al (2020) found no evidence for conflict-enhanced memory. However, they found a memory benefit for incongruent trials following incongruent trials, suggesting that conflict over two successive trials might be necessary to boost target memory.…”

Section: Task Switchingmentioning

confidence: 84%

“…Another line of research investigated the impact of conflict stimuli on subsequent memory performance (Krebs et al, 2015;Rosner et al, 2015a;Jiménez et al, 2020;Muhmenthaler and Meier, 2021a,b). It was suggested that detecting conflicts can enhance target memory (Botvinick et al, 2001(Botvinick et al, , 2004Yeung et al, 2004;Carter and Van Veen, 2007).…”

Section: Task Switchingmentioning

confidence: 99%

How attention and knowledge modulate memory: The differential impact of cognitive conflicts on subsequent memory—A review of a decade of research

Muhmenthaler

Dubravac²,

Meier³

2023

Front. Cognit.

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In order to cope with cognitive conflicts, attention and knowledge are required. In some conditions, cognitive conflicts can boost subsequent memory and in other conditions, they can attenuate subsequent memory. The goal of the present study is to provide a narrative review of studies from the last decade in which Stroop or flanker conflicts, task switching, perceptual disfluency or semantic incongruence were manipulated at study. We propose an integrative framework considering attentional mechanisms and knowledge structures. Attentional mechanisms can refer to conflict resolution, which is required to explain the memory benefit for incongruent stimuli in Stroop and Flanker paradigms. Attentional mechanisms can also refer to attention allocation, which is required to explain the memory cost for targets and the memory benefit for task-irrelevant distractors in task-switching paradigms. Moreover, attention allocation policies can also account for the inconsistent results for perceptual disfluency manipulations. Prior knowledge is required to explain effects of semantic congruency and incongruency: Information that is expected, or congruent with prior knowledge, is better remembered, namely by pre-existing schemata. Moreover, information that is unexpected or incongruent with prior knowledge attracts attention and is better remembered. The impact of prior knowledge on memory performance thus results in a U-shape function. We integrate the findings according to this framework and suggest directions for future research.

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

Cited by 8 publications

References 31 publications

Evaluating the learning of stimulus-control associations through incidental memory of reinforcement events.

Evaluating the learning of stimulus-control associations through incidental memory of reinforcement events.

Proportion of conflict, contingency learning, and recency effects in a Stroop task

How attention and knowledge modulate memory: The differential impact of cognitive conflicts on subsequent memory—A review of a decade of research

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