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The next trial will be conflicting! Effects of explicit congruency pre-cues on cognitive control

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Abstract

The dual mechanisms of control account proposed a role for proactive and reactive mechanisms in minimizing or resolving interference in conflict tasks. Proactive mechanisms are activated in advance of stimulus onset and lead to preparatory biasing of attention in a goal-directed fashion. Reactive mechanisms are triggered post-stimulus onset. Using an explicit, trial-by-trial pre-cueing procedure in a 4-choice color-word Stroop task, we investigated effects of congruency pre-cues on cognitive control. Under conditions of stimulus uncertainty (i.e., each word was associated with multiple, equally probable responses), pre-cue benefits were observed on incongruent trials when cues were 100 % valid but not when they were 75 % valid. These benefits were selectively found at the longest cue-to-stimulus interval (2,000 ms), consistent with a preparation-dependent proactive control mechanism. By contrast, when a reactive strategy of switching attention to the irrelevant dimension to predict the single correlated response was viable, pre-cue benefits were observed on incongruent trials for all cue-to-stimulus intervals including the shortest that afforded only 500 ms to prepare. The findings (a) suggest a restricted role for the preparation-dependent biasing of attention via proactive control in response to explicit, trial-by-trial pre-cues while (b) highlighting strategies that lead to pre-cue benefits but which appear to reflect primarily reactive use of the information afforded by the pre-cues. We conclude that pre-cues, though available in advance of stimulus onset, may stimulate proactive or reactive minimization of interference.

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Notes

  1. Although a cross-experimental analysis was not reported by Logan and Zbrodoff (1979), consistent with the view of Blais et al. (2012), the magnitude of the list-wide proportion congruence effect appeared to be similar in Experiment 1 wherein participants were not explicitly informed about the proportion congruency of the list and Experiments 2 and 3 wherein they were.

  2. Logan and Zbrodoff’s second experiment intermixed informative pre-cue trials and neutral (non-informative) trials within a block. A single informative pre-cue (the X or the O) was valid per block. Statistically, there was no difference between experiments except that the pre-cue benefit was bigger in Experiment 2. This may, however, be due to the fact that proportion congruence also differed between experiments.

  3. The majority of studies examining interference in Stroop tasks utilize a 4-choice design in which trials are 50 % congruent (e.g., Dishon-Berkovits & Algom, 2000). In this design, each congruent stimulus (of which there are four possible word–color pairings) is presented disproportionately more frequently than each incongruent stimulus (of which there are nine possible word–color pairings). As such, attention is attracted to the predictive word and failures of selective attention are frequent (e.g., Dishon-Berkovits & Algom, 2000; Melara & Algom, 2003), possibly the optimal conditions under which to examine the control of attention via pre-cues.

  4. In this and subsequent experiments, we aimed to collect data from 24 participants. Sample sizes varied based on participant sign-ups/show-ups by end of the data collection period (e.g., semester).

  5. To determine whether the partial counterbalancing of sub-block (CSI) order affected the results, we entered order as a factor in the ANOVA and it did not interact with any effect, including the pre-cue × trial type interaction and the pre-cue × trial type × CSI interaction.

  6. Experimenters’ response times vary trial-by-trial. Experimenters’ response times (pacing) could influence the effects of interest. To examine whether this occurred in Experiment 1, we submitted the experimenters’ response coding times (excluding trials faster than 100 ms or slower than 2,000 ms) to the same analyses as were conducted for participants’ RTs. The only significant effect was a main effect of trial type, F(1, 17) = 29.27, p < 0.001, and it was in the opposite direction of a Stroop effect, with coding times being 26 ms slower for congruent than incongruent trials (possibly because congruent trials are responded to more quickly by the participants). Importantly, all conditions were equally likely to follow congruent and incongruent trials. Consequently, if the slight difference in pacing across the two trial types did affect performance on the following trial, it would have been equally likely to affect performance in any condition. Importantly, there was no hint of the pre-cue × trial type × CSI interaction that was found for the participants’ RT data, F < 1.

  7. The analysis of the experimenters’ response coding times revealed a similar pattern as in Experiment 1. The main effect of trial type indicated 9 ms faster coding for incongruent than congruent trials. There was also a main effect of CSI in Experiment 2 due to the experimenter taking ~30 ms longer to code responses in the short than the two longer CSI conditions, F(2, 46) = 3.27, p = 0.047. Moreover, the pre-cue × trial type interaction found for participants’ RT data was not observed in the experimenters’ coding time data, F < 1.

  8. In Experiment 3, there were no significant effects in the analysis of experimenters’ response coding times.

  9. In Experiment 4, we confirmed that pacing of experimenters’ response coding did not affect the effects of interest.

  10. Consistent with this view, Raz et al. (2003) demonstrated that eye blurring is not an effective strategy for minimizing interference on incongruent trials in a non-pre-cueing Stroop paradigm. They also showed that, while gaze aversion is effective, it produces benefits on incongruent trials that are much larger (e.g., 109 ms speeding of RTs) than the largest pre-cue benefits observed on incongruent trials in the experiments in which proactive control was presumably operating.

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Acknowledgments

Julie M. Bugg, Department of Psychology, Washington University in St. Louis; Alicia Smallwood, Department of Psychology, DePauw University. We thank Nathaniel Diede and Keith Hutchison for thoughtful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript, and Chelsea Birchmeier, Zunaira Komal, Henna Mishra, Simran Sahni, Bridgette Shamleffer, and Vivian Tao for assistance with data collection.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Washington University in St. Louis, Campus Box 1125, One Brookings Dr., St. Louis, MO, 63130, USA

    Julie M. Bugg

  2. Department of Psychology, DePauw University, Greencastle, USA

    Alicia Smallwood

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  1. Julie M. Bugg
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Correspondence to Julie M. Bugg.

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Bugg, J.M., Smallwood, A. The next trial will be conflicting! Effects of explicit congruency pre-cues on cognitive control. Psychological Research 80, 16–33 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-014-0638-5

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