Control by association: Transfer of implicitly primed attentional states across linked stimuli

Abstract

Although cognitive control has traditionally been viewed in opposition to associative learning, recent studies show that people can learn to link particular stimuli with specific cognitive control states (e.g., high attentional selectivity). Here, we tested whether such learned stimulus-control associations can transfer across paired-associates. In the Stimulus-Stimulus (S-S) Association phase, specific face or house images repeatedly preceded the presentation of particular scene stimuli, creating paired face/house-scene associates in memory. The Stimulus-Control (S-C) Association phase then associated these scenes with different attentional control states by probabilistically biasing specific scenes to mostly precede either congruent or incongruent trials in a Stroop task. Finally, in the Stimulus-Control Transfer (S-CT) phase, the faces and houses from the S-S phase preceded Stroop trials but were not predictive of congruency, testing whether stimulus-control associations would transfer from scenes to their associated face/house stimuli. In Experiments 1 and 3, we found that learned implicit stimulus-control associations could transfer across closely linked cues, and in Experiment 2, we showed that this transfer depended on the memory associations formed in the S-S phase. While this form of transfer learning has previously been demonstrated for stimulus-reward associations, the present study provides the first evidence for the associative transfer of stimulus-control associations across arbitrarily linked stimuli. This work demonstrates how people can learn to implicitly adapt their processing strategies in a flexible context-dependent manner and establishes a novel learning mechanism supporting the generalization of cognitive control.

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

“…As such, any ISPC effects for these landmarks must be inherited from their associated tools. Having biased landmarks (e.g., LL2 and LH2) is not necessary for generalization to occur (Bejjani et al, 2018).…”

“…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).…”

“…To test these hypotheses, we leveraged the high temporal resolution of EEG along with a learning and generalization paradigm. Similar to previous studies of generalization (Zeithamova and Preston, 2010;Kuhl et al, 2011;Wimmer and Shohamy, 2012;Zeithamova et al, 2012;Bejjani et al, 2018), the task consisted of three phases ( Fig. 1): an association phase establishing tool-landmark associations, a training phase introducing tool-CCD associations, and a test phase assessing the generalization of CCD from tools to landmarks.…”

Spontaneous Task Structure Formation Results in a Cost to Incidental Memory of Task Stimuli

“…However, both research domains have focused on how task-set learning or preparation reflects increased cognitive flexibility (Koch et al, 2018), ignoring how structure learning can bias control-learning (cf. Bejjani et al, 2018).…”

Spontaneous task structure formation results in a cost to incidental memory of task stimuli

“…However, both research domains have focused on how task-set learning or preparation reflects increased cognitive flexibility (Koch et al, 2018), ignoring how structure learning can bias control-learning (cf. Bejjani, Zhang, & Egner, 2018).…”