Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do We Direct Attention and Control Thought?
Reassess the preceding evidence using the review's competing explanations. Return to the opening distinction between current goals and past experience: both can shape a response sequence.
A question to consider. What design changes would make a smaller interference effect after conflict more informative about control, and why would the result still not be a pure measure of a person's general control ability?
Why this reading
The same sequence of fast and slow responses can arise from different mechanisms. This review asks how conflict-driven adjustments, memory for recent events, learned contingencies, and expectations contribute to a widely used measure of control.
Before you read
A congruency effect is the difference between incongruent and congruent trials. A congruency sequence effect occurs when that difference depends on the previous trial. Feature integration binds stimulus and response features from an event; contingency learning concerns how strongly an irrelevant feature predicts a response. Neither is equivalent to deliberately increasing control.
Read for
- Work through why complete repetitions, partial repetitions, and complete changes can create different response times.
- Examine how balancing overall congruency can still leave particular distractors predictive of particular responses.
- Compare designs that separate these influences, and the review's qualified conclusions about control and explicitly induced expectations.
Consider afterwards
- A smaller congruency effect follows an incongruent trial. Design a comparison that limits both feature repetitions and response-prediction differences, and explain what uncertainty would remain.
Editorial context
This 2014 review concludes that both attentional and associative influences can contribute; it does not declare every sequence effect to be either pure control or pure learning. Results depend on task and design. Its value is the link between competing explanations and better comparisons, rather than a claim to summarize all later evidence.