Sequential modulations of correspondence effects across spatial dimensions and tasks

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

“…This conclusion, however, would be too strong, as there are a few demonstrations of reliable sequential modulation in cases in which all of the repetition confounds have been controlled and congruence was at a chance level, albeit in tasks that were much more complicated than the original forms of the Simon, flanker, and Stroop tasks. In one case, reliable amounts of sequential modulation were observed when trials alternated between two different tasks (Freitas et al, 2007); in another case, reliable sequential modulation was observed in a novel task that combined elements of the spatial version of the Stroop task and temporal flankers (Kunde & Wühr, 2006). Demonstrations of significant sequential modulation have also occurred when congruence was at chance and mostbut not all-of the repetition confounds were controlled (e.g., Notebaert et al, 2006).…”

“…In contrast, if attentional selection operates by suppressing the particular value of the irrelevant information (e.g., Neill, 1977;Tipper & Cranston, 1985) or otherwise operates in an item-specific manner (e.g., Blais, Robidoux, Risko, & Besner, 2007), congruency effects following incongruent trials may actually become negative. With regard to between-trial changes in attentional control, if this is achieved using a general-purpose (higher-order) mechanism, changes in selectivity with regard to one type of irrelevant information should also have effects on other types of irrelevant information (e.g., Freitas, Bahar, Yang, & Bahar, 2007;Kunde & Wühr, 2006). Conversely, if the control of selective attention is domain-, modality-, or dimensionspecific, then changes in one sort of selectivity could well be independent of changes in other sorts of selectivity (e.g., Akçay & Hazeltine, 2008;Funes, Lupiáñez, & Humphreys, 2010;Wendt, Kluwe, & Peters, 2006).…”

Control over the processing of the opponent’s gaze direction in basketball experts

“…Hommel, Proctor, & Vu, 2004). Two not mutually exclusive hypotheses have been put forward and supported to some extent respectively: Task-irrelevant information (i.e., misleading gaze direction) is suppressed or the focus of attention to the task-relevant information (i.e., informative/useful pass direction) is amplified in the trial following an information conflict (Kunde & Wühr, 2006).…”

Context, not conflict, drives cognitive control.

“…Neither of these accounts, nor any of the hybrid models, predicts selective performance benefits for cC relative to iC sequences without a corresponding performance benefit for iI relative to cI sequences. Yet this pattern -a trial-type repetition benefit for compatible, but not for incompatible trials -has been observed repeatedly (e.g., Akcay & Hazeltine, 2007;Kunde & Wühr, 2006;Ullsperger et al, 2005). Because of its potential significance for theories of cognitive control, the present study aims to investigate (i) whether selective performance benefits for cC sequences manifest reliably in different response conflict paradigms, and (ii) the dependence of such benefits on stimulus/response repetition.…”