Now you see it, now you don't: Controlling for contingencies and stimulus repetitions eliminates the Gratton effect

doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2011.06.002

Acta Psychologica

Volume 138, Issue 1, September 2011, Pages 176-186

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2011.06.002 Get rights and content

Abstract

The Gratton (or sequential congruency) effect is the finding that conflict effects (e.g., Stroop and Eriksen flanker effects) are larger following congruent trials relative to incongruent trials. The standard account given for this is that a cognitive control mechanism detects conflict when it occurs and adapts to this conflict on the following trial. Others, however, have questioned the conflict adaptation account and suggested that sequential biases might account for the Gratton effect. In two experiments, contingency biases were removed from the task and stimulus repetitions were deleted to control for stimulus bindings. This eliminated the Gratton effect in the response times in both experiments, supporting a non-conflict explanation of the Gratton effect. A Gratton effect did persist in the errors of Experiment 1; however, this effect was not produced by the type of errors (word reading errors) that a conflict adaptation account should predict. Instead, tentative support was found for a congruency switch cost hypothesis. In all, the conflict adaptation account failed to account for any of the reported data. Implications for future work on cognitive control are discussed.

Research highlights

► Contingency biases and stimulus repetitions explain the Gratton effect. ► Stimulus repetition trims performed in two contingency-unbiased experiments. ► The Gratton effect was eliminated in response times. ► An effect in errors was observed, but was attributed to congruency switch costs. ► No support for the conflict adaptation account of Gratton effects was observed.

Section snippets

Stimulus conflict and cognitive control

Several paradigms exist for studying stimulus conflict. One of these is the Stroop task (Stroop, 1935; see MacLeod, 1991, for a review), in which participants typically respond slower and less accurately to the print colour of a colour word if the word and colour are incongruent (e.g., the word GREEN printed in blue; GREEN_blue) rather than congruent (e.g., BLUE_blue). Similar congruency effects are observed in the Simon task (Simon & Rudell, 1967), where an irrelevant distracting location (e.g.,

Stimulus binding biases

There are a whole series of confounds present in standard Stroop paradigms that can lead towards an interaction between congruency and n − 1 congruency in the absence of conflict adaptation. Essentially all of these confounds bias the interaction in the same direction, that is, in the direction of a Gratton effect. Several of them have already been studied. The first one is related to stimulus binding effects. Hommel (1998) observed that participants respond more quickly to trials in which both

Sequential contingency biases

Contingency biases (Schmidt, in press) are a second confound that have been shown to artificially elevate the size of the Gratton effect. Experimenters often present distracting colour words more often in their congruent colour than would be expected by chance. For instance, in a four-choice task BLUE might be presented in blue 50% of the time, where chance would be 25%. This is problematic because Schmidt et al. (2007) have shown that participants learn these contingencies and respond faster

The binding account

We use the term binding account to refer to the idea that the Gratton effect is actually due to sequential confounds such as binding effects and contingencies. It has already been demonstrated that both stimulus bindings and contingencies can independently inflate the size of the Gratton effect. Thus, for instance, if one controls for stimulus repetitions, but uses a high proportion of congruent trials, then one cannot know whether the remaining effect is due to conflict adaptation or to

Congruency switch costs

In our experiments, we consider for the first time a third possible source of confounding that could also contribute to the appearance of a Gratton effect. This third source involves congruency switch costs and will be referred to as the switch hypothesis. The switch hypothesis posits that the processing and memory encoding of incongruent and congruent trials proceed somewhat differently. On incongruent trials (e.g., GREEN_blue), two response codes are generated, one by the word (green key) and

Participants

Twenty-three Ghent University undergraduates participated in exchange for course credit.

Apparatus

Participants made their responses with an AZERTY keyboard by pressing the “D” key for blue, the “F” key for green, the “J” key for yellow, and the “K” key for red. Stimulus and response timing were controlled by E-Prime (Psychology Software Tools, 2002).

Design

Stimuli were presented on a black screen and consisted of four distracting Dutch colour words (BLAUW [blue], GROEN [green], GEEL [yellow], and ROOD [red])

Experiment 2

Experiment 2 was conceptually identical to Experiment 1, but was a flanker task rather than a colour–word Stroop task. In the flanker task (Eriksen & Eriksen, 1974), a centrally-located target letter is presented with distracting letters flanking it to the left and right (e.g., FFJFF, where “J” is the target and the “F”s are distracters). The flankers match the target on congruent trials (e.g., JJJJJ) and mismatch on incongruent trials (e.g., FFJFF). Similar to a colour–word Stroop task,

General discussion

The results of two experiments provide strong support for an interpretation of the Gratton effect that does not rely on conflict adaptation processes. The response time data of both the colour–word Stroop (Experiment 1) and Eriksen flanker (Experiment 2) experiments demonstrated that if the task is not biased by contingencies and if stimulus repetitions are removed, then the Gratton effect is eliminated. Although the Gratton effect did remain in the errors of Experiment 1 (but not Experiment 2)

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^☆: This research was supported by a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Research Foundation — Flanders (FWO — Vlaanderen) to James R. Schmidt and Jan De Houwer and Grant BOF09/01M00209 of Ghent University to Jan De Houwer. James R. Schmidt is now a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation — Flanders (FWO — Vlaanderen).

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Now you see it, now you don't: Controlling for contingencies and stimulus repetitions eliminates the Gratton effect☆

Abstract

Research highlights

Section snippets

Stimulus conflict and cognitive control

Stimulus binding biases

Sequential contingency biases

The binding account

Congruency switch costs

Participants

Apparatus

Design

Experiment 2

General discussion

NeuroImage

Cognition

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Cognitive Psychology

Consciousness and Cognition

Consciousness and Cognition

Conflict monitoring and feature overlap: Two sources of sequential modulations

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

Conflict adaptation depends on task structure

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance

Behavioral and neural evidence for item-specific performance monitoring

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

Item-specific adaptation and the conflict monitoring hypothesis: A computational model

Psychological Review

Conflict monitoring and cognitive control

Psychological Review

Processing abstract sequence structure: Learning without knowing, or knowing without learning?

Psychological Research

Imaging cognition: An empirical review of PET studies with normal subjects

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

On the control of automatic processes: A parallel distributed processing account of the Stroop effect

Psychological Review

Progress in the use of interactive models for understanding attention and performance

Sequential dependencies in the Eriksen flanker task: A direct comparison of two competing accounts

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

Effects of noise letters upon the identification of a target letter in a nonsearch task

Perception & Psychophysics

Contextual adjustments in cognitive control across tasks

Psychological Science

Analyzing the generality of conflict adaptation effects

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance

Optimizing the use of information: Strategic control of activation of responses

Journal of Experimental Psychology. General

Event files: Evidence for automatic integration of stimulus–response episodes

Visual Cognition

Item-specific control of automatic processes: Stroop process dissociations

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

Mental set and shift

Archives of Psychology