Now you see it, now you don't: Controlling for contingencies and stimulus repetitions eliminates the Gratton effect

Schmidt, Joana; Houwer, Jan De

doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2011.06.002

Cited by 185 publications

(254 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Stroop-like congruency effects increase as the proportion of congruent trials increases (e.g., Hommel, 1994;Logan & Zbrodoff, 1979;Toth et al, 1995). To explain this phenomenon, it has mostly been argued that participants aggregate response-related information from the irrelevant and relevant dimension, and topdown modulate their attention to the irrelevant information depending on the proportion of congruent trials (Botvinick, Braver, Barch, Carter, & Cohen, 2001;Logan & Zbrodoff, 1979; but see Schmidt & De Houwer, 2011). For instance, in a Stroop task with a relatively high proportion of congruent trials, the response associated with the task-irrelevant information (i.e., color words) is most often in line with the correct response.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lying relies on the truth

2014

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Cognitive models of deception focus on the conflict-inducing nature of the truth activation during lying. Here we tested the counterintuitive hypothesis that the truth can also serve a functional role in the act of lying. More specifically, we examined whether the construction of a lie can involve a two-step process, where the first step entails activating the truth, based upon which a lie response can be formulated in a second step. To investigate this hypothesis, we tried to capture the covert truth activation in a reaction-time based deception paradigm.Together with each question, we presented either the truth or lie response as distractors. If lying depends on the covert activation of the truth, deceptive responses would thus be facilitated by truth distractors relative to lie distractors. Our results indeed revealed such a "covert congruency" effect, both in errors and reaction times (Experiment 1). Moreover, stimulating participants to use the distractor information by increasing the proportion of truth distractor trials enlarged the "covert congruency" effects, and as such confirmed that the effects operate at a covert response level (Experiment 2). Our findings lend support to the idea that lying relies on a first step of truth telling, and call for a shift in theoretical thinking that highlights both the functional and interfering properties of the truth activation in the lying process.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lying relies on the truth

2014

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“…It is also challenging to completely control for contingency biases. For example, while Experiment 1 determined a way to deconfound incongruent trials, congruent trials are inherently confounded: high PC congruent words are high contingency and low PC congruent words are low contingency (for similar problems with the Gratton paradigm, see Schmidt & De Houwer, 2011).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Parallel Episodic Processing (PEP) model: Dissociating contingency and conflict adaptation in the item-specific proportion congruent paradigm

Schmidt

2013

Acta Psychologica

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“…If a task has less than four response options, then the number of possible conditions is reduced (for further explanation, see Schmidt & De Houwer, 2011). 2 An anonymous reviewer suggested that this claim is false because, in each participant, there are multiple observations (i.e., trials) for each of the 15 trial types.…”

Section: Footnotesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Actual and model-estimated mean RTs in milliseconds (data from Schmidt & De Houwer, 2011;Mordkoff, 2012 …”

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Removing the influence of feature repetitions on the congruency sequence effect: Why regressing out confounds from a nested design will often fall short.

Schmidt¹,

Schryver²,

Weissman³

2014

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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This paper illustrates a shortcoming of using regression to control for confounds in nested designs. As an example, we consider the congruency sequence effect (CSE), which is the observation that the congruency effect in distracter interference (e.g., Stroop) tasks is smaller following incongruent as compared to congruent trials. The CSE is often interpreted as indexing conflict adaptation: a relative increase of attention to the target following incongruent trials. However, feature repetitions across consecutive trials can complicate this interpretation. To control for this confound, the standard procedure is to delete all trials with a stimulus or response repetition and analyze the remaining trials. Notebaert and Verguts (2007) present an alternative method that allows researchers to use all trials. Specifically, they employ multiple regression to model conflict adaptation independent of feature repetitions.We show here that this approach fails to account for certain feature repetition effects. Further, modelling these additional effects is typically not possible due to an upper bound on the number of degrees of freedom in the experiment. These findings have important implications for future investigations of conflict adaptation and, more broadly, for all researchers who attempt to regress out confounds in nested designs.

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Now you see it, now you don't: Controlling for contingencies and stimulus repetitions eliminates the Gratton effect

Cited by 185 publications

References 39 publications

Lying relies on the truth

Lying relies on the truth

The Parallel Episodic Processing (PEP) model: Dissociating contingency and conflict adaptation in the item-specific proportion congruent paradigm

Removing the influence of feature repetitions on the congruency sequence effect: Why regressing out confounds from a nested design will often fall short.

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