Doubts About the Role of Rehearsal in the Irrelevant Sound Effect

The irrelevant sound effect (ISE) describes the disruption of processes involved in maintaining information in working memory (WM) when irrelevant noise is present in the environment. While some posit that the ISE arises due to split obligation of attention to the irrelevant sound and the to-be-remembered information, others have argued that background noise corrupts the order of information within WM. Support for the latter position comes from research showing that the ISE appears to be most robust in tasks that emphasize ordered maintenance by a serial rehearsal strategy, and diminished when rehearsal is discouraged or precluded by task characteristics. This prior work confounds the demand for seriation with rehearsal. Thus, the present study aims to disentangle ordered maintenance from a rehearsal strategy by using a running memory span task that requires ordered output but obviates the utility of rehearsal. Across four experiments, we find a significant ISE that persists under conditions that should discourage the use of rehearsal and among individuals who self-report use of alternative strategies. These findings indicate that rehearsal is not necessary to produce an ISE in a serial recall task and thus fail to corroborate accounts of the ISE that emphasize the involvement of rehearsal.

Further Evidence for the Binding and Retrieval of Control-States From the Flanker Task

In response-interference tasks, congruency effects are reduced in trials that follow an incongruent trial. This congruence sequence effect (CSE) has been taken to reflect top-down cognitive control processes that monitor for and intervene in case of conflict. In contrast, episodic-memory accounts explain CSEs with bottom-up retrieval of stimulus-response links. Reconciling these opposing views, an emerging perspective holds that memory stores instances of control – abstract control-states – creating a shortcut for effortful control processes. Support comes from a study that assessed CSEs in a prime-target task. Here, repeating an irrelevant context feature boosted CSEs, possibly by retrieving previously stored control-states. We present a conceptual replication using the Eriksen flanker task because previous research found that CSEs in the flanker task reflect different control mechanisms than CSEs in the prime-target task. We measured CSEs while controlling for stimulus–response memory effects and manipulated contextual information (vertical spatial location) independently from the stimulus information, which introduced the conflict (horizontal spatial location). Results replicate previous findings – CSEs increased for context-repetition compared to context-changes. This study shows that retrieval of control-states is not limited to a specific task or context feature and therefore generalizes the notion that abstract control parameters are stored into trial-specific event files.

Is There Semantic Conflict in the Stroop Task?

This research addressed current controversies concerning the contribution of semantic conflict to the Stroop interference effect and its reduction by a single-letter coloring and cueing procedure. On the first issue, it provides, for the first time, unambiguous evidence for a contribution of semantic conflict to the (overall) Stroop interference effect. The reported data remained inconclusive on the second issue, despite being collected in a considerable sample and analyzed with both classical (frequentist) and Bayesian inferential approaches. Given that in all past Stroop studies, semantic conflict was possibly confounded with either response conflict (e.g., when semantic-associative items [ SKYblue] are used to induce semantic conflict) or with facilitation (when color-congruent items [ BLUEblue] are used as baseline to derive a magnitude for semantic conflict), its genuine contribution to the Stroop interference effect is the most critical result reported in the present study. Indeed, it leaves no doubt – in complete contrast to dominant single-stage response competition models (e.g., Roelofs, 2003 ) – that selection occurs at the semantic level in the Stroop task. The immediate implications for the composite (as opposed to unitary) nature of the Stroop interference effect and other still unresolved issues in the Stroop literature are outlined further.

The Challenge of Inferring Unconscious Mental Processes

Studies of unconscious mental processes often compare a performance measure (e.g., some assessment of perception or memory) with a measure of awareness (e.g., a verbal report or forced-choice response) of the critical cue or contingency taken either concurrently or separately. The resulting patterns of bivariate data across participants lend themselves to several analytic approaches for inferring the existence of unconscious mental processes, but it is rare for researchers to consider the underlying generative processes that might cause these patterns. We show that bivariate data are generally insufficient to discriminate single-process models, with a unitary latent process determining both performance and awareness, from dual-process models, comprising distinct latent processes for performance and awareness. Future research attempting to isolate and investigate unconscious processes will need to employ richer types of data and analyses.

Smaller Than Expected

In two pre-registered studies, we investigated whether processes of imitative action regulation are facilitated after experiencing an episode of social exclusion. We reasoned that imitative action regulation effects should be more pronounced for participants who were socially excluded, providing them with an “automatic means” to socially reconnect with others. Participants played a virtual ball-tossing game to experimentally induce social exclusion or inclusion experiences. Subsequently, pairs of two participants engaged in an observational stimulus–response (SR) binding paradigm modeled after Giesen et al. (2014) : Participants observed color categorization responses in their interaction partner (trial n-1) and then executed (in)compatible responses in the subsequent trial (trial n), with observation and responding occurring in alternation. Stimulus relation (repetition vs. change) from trial n-1 to trial n was orthogonally manipulated. In both studies, stimulus-based retrieval effects of observationally acquired SR bindings were descriptively larger in socially excluded (compared with socially included) participants. However, none of the effects were statistically significant. Even a joint analysis of both experiments did not show the expected modulation. We discuss the implications of our findings for research on social exclusion effects on imitative action regulation processes.

Inhibition of Eye Movements Disrupts Spatial Sequence Learning

Implicit sequence learning is an integral part of human experience, yet the nature of the mechanisms underlying this type of learning remains a matter of debate. In the current study, we provide a test for two accounts of implicit sequence learning, that is, one that highlights sequence learning in the absence of any motor responses (with suppressed eye movements) and one that highlights the relative contribution of the motor processes (i.e., eye movements) to learning. To adjudicate between these accounts and determine whether a motor response is a requisite process in sequence learning, we used anticipation measures to compare performance on the standard oculomotor serial reaction time (SRT) task and on a version of the SRT task where the eye movements were restricted during the learning phase. our results demonstrated an increased proportion of correct anticipations in the standard SRT task compared to the restricted-movement task.

Individual Differences in Lexical Repetition Priming

The current research investigated whether individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) and affective states have differential effects on lexical-semantic repetition priming outcomes based on whether participants were first- or second-language English speakers. Individual differences in priming effects have often been overlooked in the priming literature. Using logistic mixed-effects models to account for within-subject variation, the current paper investigated a three-way interaction between WMC, negative affect (NA) score, and language primacy on lexical-semantic repetition priming outcomes. The results indicate that a statistically significant three-way interaction exists between language primacy, WMC, and NA scores. No significant interaction effect was found for positive affect scores. We present an argument which posits that an individual’s primary language and subsequent familiarity with the primed concepts, in conjunction with individual differences in WMC and mood, plays an important role in determining the most effective strategy used to complete a word-stem completion task. The implications of the findings presented highlight that second-language English speakers are more susceptible to priming effects when prime-inducing stimuli are constructed using English lexicon; however, larger WMC and heighted negative affective states help to mitigate these priming effects.

Goal-Based Binding of Irrelevant Stimulus Features for Action Slips

Binding between representations of stimuli and actions and later retrieval of these compounds provide efficient shortcuts in action control. Recent observations indicate that these mechanisms are not only effective when action episodes go as planned, but they also seem to be at play when actions go awry. Moreover, the human cognitive system even corrects traces of error commission on the fly because it binds the intended but not actually executed response to concurrent task-relevant stimuli, thus enabling retrieval of a correct, but not actually executed response when encountering the stimulus again. However, a plausible alternative interpretation of this finding is that error commission triggers selective strengthening of the instructed stimulus–response mapping instead, thus promoting its efficient application in the future. The experiment presented here makes an unequivocal case for episodic binding and retrieval in erroneous action episodes by showing binding between task-irrelevant stimuli and correct responses.