Limits on the generalizability of context-driven control

Abstract

Context-driven control refers to the fast and flexible weighting of stimulus dimensions that may be applied at the onset of a stimulus. Evidence for context-driven control comes from interference tasks in which participants encounter a high proportion of incongruent trials at one location and a high proportion of congruent trials at another location. Since the size of the congruency effect varies as a function of location, this suggests that stimulus dimensions are weighted differently based on the context in which they appear. However, manipulations of condition proportion are often confounded by variations in the frequency with which particular stimuli are encountered. To date, there is limited evidence for the context-driven control in the absence of stimulus frequency confounds. In the current paper, we attempt to replicate and extend one such finding [Crump, M. J. C., & Milliken, B. (2009). The flexibility of context-specific control: Evidence for context-driven generalization of item-specific control settings. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 62, 1523-1532]. Across three experiments we fail to find evidence for context-driven control in the absence of stimulus frequency confounds. Based on these results, we argue that consistency in the informativeness of the irrelevant dimension may be required for context-driven control to emerge.

Evidence against conflict monitoring and adaptation: An updated review

“…This finding, of course, cannot be explained by (context-specific) contingency learning and is therefore seemingly inconsistent with the results of Schmidt and Lemercier (2018). A subsequent series of experiments did, however, fail to replicate this key transfer effect (Hutcheon & Spieler, 2017), though the original authors were able to replicate the effect again (Crump, Brosowsky, & Milliken, 2017), albeit with much smaller effect sizes. Although further replications from independent labs would be desirable, these results do suggest that some small CSPC effect might still remain after controlling for (Bcontext-specific^) contingency biases.…”

Cortical and subcortical contributions to context-control learning

“…1b, c). This suggests that a spatial location can come to serve as a bottom-up predictive cue for retrieving a context-appropriate top-down control set (for additional discussion, see Crump et al, 2017;Hutcheon and Spieler, 2017). Other recent studies have demonstrated this type of modulation of the congruency effect using a wide variety of different contextual cues, including stimulus location Corballis & Gratton, 2003;Crump, 2016;Crump et al, 2017;Crump, Gong, & Milliken, 2006;Hübner & Mishra, 2016;King, Korb, & Egner, 2012;Weidler & Bugg, 2016), font (Bugg, Jacoby, & Toth, 2008;Crump, 2016), shape (Crump, Vaquero, & Milliken, 2008), color (Vietze & Wendt, 2009), social categories (Cañadas, Rodríguez-Bailón, Milliken, & Lupiáñez, 2013) and incidental sematic cues (Blais, Harris, Sinanian, & Bunge, 2015).…”

Challenging voices: Mixed evidence for context-specific control adjustments in the auditory domain

“…Although many successful replications and variations of the CSPC exist, there are indications that it underlies strict limitations. Hutcheon and Spieler (2017) have tried to replicate the original findings of Crump and Milliken (2009) who first added unbiased items to their design to rule out any lower level processes in responding as source of the effect. Their results from three experiments did not match the original results: They did not find any CSPC effects either in the frequency biased or in the unbiased transfer items.…”

“…In the light of our and earlier results (cf. Crump et al, 2017; Hutcheon & Spieler, 2017), some methodological recommendations that can minimise a large part of this noise can be inferred. A different type of transfer manipulation, for example, can solve the issue of attenuated context cues.…”