Observation: Three reasons to avoid having half of the trials be congruent in a four-alternative forced-choice experiment on sequential modulation

Abstract

Sequential modulation is the finding that the sizes of several selective-attention phenomena-namely, the Simon, flanker, and Stroop effects-are larger following congruent trials than following incongruent trials. In order to rule out relatively uninteresting explanations of sequential modulation that are based on a variety of stimulus-and response-repetition confounds, a four-alternative forced choice task must be used, such that all trials with any kind of repetition can be omitted from the analysis. When a fouralternative task is used, the question arises as to whether to have the proportions of congruent and incongruent trials be set by chance (and, therefore, be 25% congruent and 75% incongruent) or to raise the proportion of congruent trials to 50%, so that it matches the proportion of incongruent trials. In this observation, it is argued that raising the proportion of congruent trials to 50% should not be done. For theoretical, practical, and empirical reasons, having half of the trials be congruent in a four-alternative task aimed at providing unambiguous evidence of sequential modulation should be avoided.

The hot-hand fallacy in cognitive control: Repetition expectancy modulates the congruency sequence effect

“…1B). As Mordkoff (2012) argued, increasing the proportion of congruent trials makes the irrelevant task dimension (i.e., the color word in the Stroop task) informative (see also Dishon-Berkovits & Algom, 2000). As a consequence, participants might have been encouraged to pay more attention to the distractor word.…”

Time-out for conflict monitoring theory: Preventing rhythmic biases eliminates the list-level proportion congruent effect.

“…However, as noted earlier, the prime-probe task is particularly potent (e.g., , unlike the Stroop task. This potency also seems to be true of the Simon task ; but see, Mordkoff, 2012) and a similar design to the current one was used by Wühr and colleagues (2015) with the Simon task, which revealed a robust LLPC effect. Thus, it was deemed likely that the prime-probe task would produce an observable LLPC effect (which proved true).…”

“…First, this paradigm has been used recently , 2015, 2016Weissman, Egner, Hawks, & Link, 2015;Weissman, Jiang, & Egner, 2014) to investigate the congruency sequence effect (see Gratton, Coles, & Donchin, 1992), another purported measure of conflict adaptation. This has proven highly effective at finding robust effects in the absence of several important confounds (for a discussion of the confounds, see Hommel, Proctor, & Vu, 2004;Mayr, Awh, & Laurey, 2003;Mordkoff, 2012;Schmidt & De Houwer, 2011;Schmidt, De Schryver, & Weissman, 2014). The same controls for confounds eliminated the effect in more traditional paradigms, such as the Stroop and flanker tasks.…”

The Parallel Episodic Processing (PEP) model 2.0: A single computational model of stimulus-response binding, contingency learning, power curves, and mixing costs

“…In addition to practice curves, episodic memory models have been proposed for a broad range of other performance phenomena, including contingency learning (Schmidt, Crump, Cheesman, & Besner, 2007;Schmidt & De Houwer, 2012a, 2012c, 2012d, 2016aSchmidt, De Houwer, & Besner, 2010), feature binding effects (Frings, Rothermund, & Wentura, 2007;Hommel, 1998), negative priming (Rothermund, Wentura, & De Houwer, 2005), proportion congruent effects (Schmidt, 2013a(Schmidt, , 2013b, congruency sequence effects (Hommel et al, 2004;Mayr, Awh, & Laurey, 2003;Mordkoff, 2012;Schmidt & De Houwer, 2011), evaluative conditioning (Schmidt & De Houwer, 2012b), task switch costs (Logan & Bundesen, 2003Logan & Schneider, 2006a, 2006bLogan, Schneider, & Bundesen, 2007;Schmidt & Liefooghe, 2016;, rhythmic responding (Kinoshita et al, 2008;Kinoshita et al, 2011;Mozer et al, 2004;Schmidt, 2013cSchmidt, , 2014Schmidt, Lemercier, et al, 2014;Schmidt & Weissman, 2016), and various other phenomena.…”