Studying the role of cognitive control in reasoning: evidence for the congruency sequence effect in the ratio-bias task

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Balazs Aczel ◽  
Bence Palfi
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 191353
Author(s):  
Balazs Aczel ◽  
Marton Kovacs ◽  
Miklos Bognar ◽  
Bence Palfi ◽  
Andree Hartanto ◽  
...  

Exploring the mechanisms of cognitive control is central to understanding how we control our behaviour. These mechanisms can be studied in conflict paradigms, which require the inhibition of irrelevant responses to perform the task. It has been suggested that in these tasks, the detection of conflict enhances cognitive control resulting in improved conflict resolution of subsequent trials. If this is the case, then this so-called congruency sequence effect can be expected to occur in cross-domain tasks. Previous research on the domain-generality of the effect presented inconsistent results. In this study, we provide a multi-site replication of three previous experiments of Kan et al . (Kan IP, Teubner-Rhodes S, Drummey AB, Nutile L, Krupa L, Novick JM 2013 Cognition 129 , 637–651) which test congruency sequence effect between very different domains: from a syntactic to a non-syntactic domain (Experiment 1), and from a perceptual to a verbal domain (Experiments 2 and 3). Despite all our efforts, we found only partial support for the claims of the original study. With a single exception, we could not replicate the original findings; the data remained inconclusive or went against the theoretical hypothesis. We discuss the compatibility of the results with alternative theoretical frameworks.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guochun Yang ◽  
Xu Honghui ◽  
Li Zhenghan ◽  
Weizhi Nan ◽  
Haiyan Wu ◽  
...  

Congruence effect can be modulated by adjacent conflict conditions, producing congruency sequence effect (CSE). However, there are boundary conditions preventing the transfer of cross-conflict CSE. Intensive discussions have been made on whether CSE reflects top-down control or bottom-up associative learning, but neither could perfectly interpret the various boundary conditions. Their imperfection recently inspired an integrative associative learning account of cognitive control, which predicted that conflict similarity affects the magnitude of the cross-conflict CSE. We examined this hypothesis by introducing a compound condition containing both spatial Stroop and Simon components in Experiment 1. The conflict similarity was defined by the amount 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, respectively. Mixed-effect modeling analyses indicated that in all experiments, the cross-conflict CSEs were positively correlated to the similarity of the two conflict conditions. Specifically, the compound condition with the same amount of Stroop and Simon components generated comparable CSE with both Stroop and Simon conditions (Experiment 1). When the compound condition was more similar to the Stroop than the Simon condition, a trend of 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 associative learning account of cognitive control.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Balazs Aczel ◽  
Marton Kovacs ◽  
Miklos Bognar ◽  
Bence Palfi ◽  
Andree Hartanto ◽  
...  

Exploring the mechanisms of cognitive control is central to understanding how we control our behaviour. These mechanisms can be studied in conflict paradigms, which require the inhibition of irrelevant responses to perform the task. It has been suggested that in these tasks the detection of conflict enhances cognitive control resulting in improved conflict resolution of subsequent trials. If this is the case then this so-called congruency sequence effect can be expected to occur in cross-domain tasks. Previous research on the domain-generality of the effect presented inconsistent results. In this study, we provide a multi-site replication of three previous experiments of Kan et al. (2013) which test congruency sequence effect between very different domains: from a syntactic to a non-syntactic domain (Experiment 1), and from a perceptual to a verbal domain (Experiment 2 and 3). Despite all our efforts, we found only partial support for the claims of the original study. With a single exception, we could not replicate the original findings, the data remained inconclusive or went against the theoretical hypothesis. We discuss the compatibility of the results with alternative theoretical frameworks.


2013 ◽  
Vol 221 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerstin Jost ◽  
Wouter De Baene ◽  
Iring Koch ◽  
Marcel Brass

The role of cue processing has become a controversial topic in research on cognitive control using task-switching procedures. Some authors suggested a priming account to explain switch costs as a form of encoding benefit when the cue from the previous trial is repeated and hence challenged theories that attribute task-switch costs to task-set (re)configuration. A rich body of empirical evidence has evolved that indeed shows that cue-encoding repetition priming is an important component in task switching. However, these studies also demonstrate that there are usually substantial “true” task-switch costs. Here, we review this behavioral, electrophysiological, and brain imaging evidence. Moreover, we describe alternative approaches to the explicit task-cuing procedure, such as the usage of transition cues or the task-span procedure. In addition, we address issues related to the type of cue, such as cue transparency. We also discuss methodological and theoretical implications and argue that the explicit task-cuing procedure is suitable to address issues of cognitive control and task-set switching.


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