Context-Specific Adjustment of Cognitive Control: Transfer of Adaptive Control Sets

Abstract

Cognitive control protects processing of relevant information from interference by irrelevant information. The level of this processing selectivity can be flexibly adjusted to different control demands (e.g., frequency of conflict) associated with a certain context, leading to the formation of specific context-control associations. In the present study we investigated the robustness and transferability of the acquired context-control demands to new situations. In three experiments, we used a version of the context-specific proportion congruence (CSPC) paradigm, in which each context (e.g., location) is associated with a specific conflict frequency, determining high and low control demands. In a learning phase, associations between context and control demands were established. In a subsequent transfer block, stimulus-response mappings, whole task sets, or context-control demands changed. Results showed an impressive robustness of context-control associations, as context-specific adjustments of control from the learning phase were virtually unaffected by new stimuli and tasks in the transfer block. Only a change of the context-control demand eliminated the context-specific adjustment of control. These findings suggest that context-control associations that have proven to be adaptive in the past are continuously applied despite major changes in the task structure as long as the context-control associations remain the same.

Cortical and subcortical contributions to context-control learning

“…Taken together, the studies reviewed above provide compelling evidence that specific contextual cues, be they stimulus locations, features or individual items (identities), as well as temporal episodes, can become associated with particular conflict control settings and trigger them in a cue-driven, bottom-up manner. Importantly, though, context-control learning is not limited to conflict-control in Stroop-type tasks, as equivalent effects have also been documented in tasks that probe other components of cognitive control or attention, including task-switching (e.g., Crump and Logan, 2010;Leboe et al, 2008), response inhibition (e.g., Verbruggen and Logan, 2008), dual-tasking (e.g., Fischer et al, 2014;Surrey et al, 2017), Simon task (e.g., Hübner and Mishra, 2016) and attention capture (e.g., Crump et al, 2018). For instance, switch costs -longer response times and lower accuracy when one has to switch rather than to repeat a task set -are thought to reflect control processes of reconfiguring a task-set (Rogers & Monsell, 1995) and/or overcoming interference from a previous set (Allport, Styles, & Hsieh, 1994).…”

“…Dishon-Berkovits and Algom, 2000; Melara and Algom, 2003;Schmidt and Besner, 2008). Specifically, contrary to the assumption of specific context-stimulus-response associations driving this effect, the context-specific performance benefits generalize to new and unbiased stimuli (Bugg, Jacoby, & Chanani, 2011;Crump & Milliken, 2009;Surrey, Dreisbach, & Fischer, 2017). For instance, in the above-mentioned study by Crump & Milliken (2009), the authors created the proportion congruency bias at each location using one subset of stimuli while another subset of stimuli was presented in congruent or incongruent form with equal likelihood at both locations.…”

“…Context-control learning may also potentially serve as a powerful aid for treating clinical populations with deficits in goal-directed control (e.g., addiction, obsessive compulsive disorder). Although there is empirical evidence for the generalizability of control learning to untrained stimuli, the promoting and impeding factors for such generalization have only just begun to be explored (e.g., Bejjani, Zhang, & Egner, 2018;Crump & Milliken, 2009;Surrey et al, 2017;Weidler & Bugg, 2016;Wühr, Duthoo, & Notebaert, 2014). Future studies should thus investigate the possibility of transferring control learning across different, associated contexts in order to facilitate possible translation of laboratory findings to clinical applications.…”

Temporal Dynamics of Memory-guided Cognitive Control and Generalization of Control via Overlapping Associative Memories

“…For example, the high CCD associated with the busy overpass may be generalized to the roads near the overpass without directly experiencing high CCD on those roads. Indeed, the generalization of CCD has been documented in human behavior (Crump and Milliken, 2009;King et al, 2012;Weidler and Bugg, 2016;Surrey et al, 2017;Bejjani et al, 2018), although the neurocognitive mechanisms remain poorly understood. As a second goal, we tested the hypothesis that the generalization of CCD can be achieved through integrative encoding (Shohamy and Wagner, 2008;Kuhl et al, 2010), wherein partially overlapping associations (e.g., overpass-road and overpass-CCD) result in the formation of an integrated representation (e.g., overpass-road-CCD) that supports direct retrieval of CCD expectations for an item (e.g., road as cue) that have been inherited from another associated item (e.g., overpass).…”

The transfer of location-based control requires location-based conflict

“…Importantly, not all contextual information present in a situation producing conflict can become a cue for future adaptive control. Only certain features of the context become episodically bound (Surrey et al, 2017), and there is evidence that selectively attended features are preferentially encoded. The hippocampus is well known for its role in spatial learning and episodic binding, and its activity during encoding is predictive of subsequent benefits in rapid implicit cueing of attention by contextual features (Goldfarb, Chun, & Phelps, 2016).…”