The congruency sequence effect is modulated by the similarity of conflicts.

Abstract

The congruence effect can be modulated by adjacent conflict conditions, producing the congruency sequence effect (CSE). However, many boundary conditions prevent the transfer of the cross-conflict CSE. A consensus has been achieved that the CSE reflects both top-down control and bottom-up associative learning, but neither perspective could perfectly interpret the various boundary conditions. Their imperfections recently inspired an integrative learning account of cognitive control, which predicts that conflict similarity affects the magnitude of the cross-conflict CSE. We examined this hypothesis with the spatial Stroop-Simon paradigm by introducing a compound condition containing both the Stroop and Simon components (Experiment 1). The conflict similarity was defined by the degree of component overlap, as manipulated by the polar angle of the target arrow in Experiments 2a and 2b and by the Euclidean distance of the target arrow in Experiments 3a and 3b. Mixed-effect modeling analyses indicated that, in all experiments, the cross-conflict CSEs were positively correlated with the similarity among conflict conditions. Specifically, the compound condition with equal Stroop and Simon components generated comparable CSEs with both the Stroop and Simon conditions (Experiment 1). When the compound condition was more similar to the Stroop than the Simon condition, a trend of a larger CSE was observed between the compound conflict and the Stroop condition than between the compound conflict and the Simon condition, and vice versa (Experiments 2 and 3). Our study revealed that the continuum of the cross-conflict CSE was modulated by conflict similarity, hence supporting the integrative learning account of cognitive control.

Conflicts are parametrically encoded: initial evidence for a cognitive space view to reconcile the debate of domain-general and domain-specific cognitive control

“…Behaviorally, we found that the CSEs were linearly modulated by conflict similarity between consecutive trials, replicating and extending our previous study (Yang et al, 2021). BOLD activity patterns in the right dlPFC further showed that the representational similarity between conflict types was modulated by their conflict similarity, and that strength of the modulation was positively associated with the modulation of conflict similarity on the behavioral CSE.…”

“…Experiment 1 Experimental Design. We adopted a modified spatial Stroop-Simon task (Yang et al, 2021) (Fig. 1).…”

“…The final sample of Experiment 2 consisted of thirty-five participants (19-29 years old, average of 22.3 ± 2.5 years old; 17 males). The sample sizes were determined based on our previous study (Yang et al, 2021). All participants reported no history of psychiatric or neurological disorders and were right-handed, with normal or corrected-to-normal vision.…”

“…We further hypothesize that the cognitive space representing different types of conflicts may be located in the frontoparietal network due to its essential roles in conflict resolution (Freund, Bugg, et al, 2021;Fu et al, 2022) and abstract task representation (Vaidya & Badre, 2022). In this study, we adjusted the paradigm from our previous study (Yang et al, 2021) by including transitions of trials from five different conflict types, which enabled us to test if these conflict types are organized in a cognitive space (Fig. 1A).…”

The many faces of learning-guided cognitive control.

“…While trial-by-trial explicit cues often do not result in smaller congruency effects, experience-based control is well known to produce such effects, in the shape of the so-called congruency-sequence effects, whereby an incongruent N-1 trial results in a smaller congruency effect on trial N, arguably due to an up-regulation of control. In line with other recent studies (e.g., Dignath et al, 2019; Grant et al, 2020; Spapé & Hommel, 2008), Yang et al (2021) here showed that this effect, too, involves an associative learning component. Specifically, the degree to which this effect is expressed depends on the similarity of the control demands across trials.…”