Unconscious conflicts in unconscious contexts: The role of awareness and timing in flexible conflict adaptation.

Abstract

Humans adapt to context-specific frequencies of response conflicts. Typically, the impact of conflict-inducing information is reduced in contexts with high compared to low frequency of conflict. We investigated how such context-specific conflict adaptation depends on awareness and timing of conflict-eliciting stimuli and conflict-signaling contexts. In a priming paradigm, we varied the visibility of the prime and whether the context is a feature of either prime or target. Concretely, the context was represented by the format of either prime (Experiment 1) or target (Experiment 2), which means that primes or targets of a particular format were associated with a high or low probability of conflict (i.e., prime-target incongruency). In both experiments, we found a context-specific modulation of congruency effects, both with masked and visible primes. To control for mechanisms of event learning in Experiments 3 and 4, context-specific conflict frequency was realized by inducing trials, while stimuli in test trials were associated with equal conflict frequency. We again found a context-specific congruency modulation when the prime represented the context, most interestingly also with masked primes within test trials. When the target represented the context, however, such a modulation occurred with visible primes, but not with masked primes. These results provide a compelling case for the unconscious exertion of a very flexible form of cognitive control. Context-specific conflict adaptation processes can basically operate independently of both conflict awareness and context awareness, but they depend on close temporal proximity of context and conflict information.

Conscious and unconscious context-specific cognitive control

“…If anything, our results indicate that the CSPC effect does not depend on awareness, contrary to the conclusion of Heinemann et al (2009). This is in line with a recent study by Reuss et al (2014) where the visibility of primes was manipulated in several masked priming experiments, while the conflict context was determined by the format of either the prime or the target. By associating the context with either prime or target, they could furthermore investigate whether the temporal proximity between context information and conflict is of importance for unconscious cognitive control to occur.…”

Limits on the generalizability of context-driven control

“…Whereas the weighting of stimulus dimensions is classically thought to reflect relatively stable processes implemented based on task instructions (Cohen et al, 1990;Miller & Cohen, 2001), the CSPC transfer effect demonstrates that dimension weighting varies as a function of stimulus experience. While other studies have demonstrated a CSPC effect for frequency-unbiased stimuli (King, Donkin, Korb, & Egner, 2012; Reuss, Desender, Kiesel, & Kunde, 2014;Weidler & Bugg, 2016), we know of no other report of a location-based CSPC transfer effect in the literature where the contribution of context and transfer sets can be independently estimated. In Experiment 1 we perform a direction replication of the context-level transfer manipulation used by Crump and Milliken (2009) and look for evidence that context-driven control generalizes to frequency-unbiased stimuli.…”

Generalizing attentional control across dimensions and tasks: Evidence from transfer of proportion-congruent effects

“…A first group of studies used subliminal stimulus presentation for investigating the role of awareness in CSPS effects, but obtained mixed results. Some studies suggest that CSPC effects require awareness (Heinemann, Kunde, & Kiesel, 2009) but others do not (Reuss, Desender, Kiesel, & Kunde, 2014;Schouppe, de Ferrere, Van Opstal, Braem, & Notebaert, 2014). In another study, Crump, Gong, and Milliken (2006) asked participants whether they were aware of the precise proportion manipulation following the experiment.…”