Both stimulus-control state associations and stimulus-response associations contribute to item-specific proportion congruency effect

Poster Session A - Saturday, April 13, 2024, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Bingfang Huang¹ (bingfang-huang@uiowa.edu), Jiefeng Jiang¹; ¹University of Iowa

Cognitive control coordinates our thoughts and actions with internal goals. The cognitive control system is adaptive when conflict conditions change. Item-specific proportion congruent (ISPC) effect is a classic phenomenon of the adaptative conflict effect. It means when participants unconsciously experience 50% congruent condition and 50% incongruent condition overall while mostly congruent (MC) condition for one set of stimuli and mostly incongruent (MI) condition for another set of stimuli, the conflict effect (i.e., performance in incongruent condition compared to congruent condition) in the MI condition decreases compared with that in the MC condition. Many studies have been done to explore the mechanisms of the ISPC effect. ISPC effect is believed to be triggered by the learning of the stimulus-control state (SC) associations and/or contingency learning of the stimulus-response (SR) associations. The current consensus is that SC and SR associations learning will dominate the ISPC effect under different situations. However, it is currently unknown whether the learning of both SC and SR simultaneously contribute to the ISPC effect. We try to address this question by decoding the SC and SR associations from Electroencephalogram (EEG) data in a 4-key Stroop task with ISPC manipulations (n = 12). The behavioral results repeated the classic ISPC effect. Preliminary EEG results showed both SC and SR associations can be decoded early following stimulus onset. Therefore, our study provides initial evidence for concurrent contributions of SC and SR learning in cognitive control.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Goal maintenance & switching