Going, going, gone: characterizing the time-course of congruency sequence effects

Egner, Tobias; Ely, Sora; Grinband, Jack

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00154

Cited by 124 publications

(179 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…However, there is evidence that it is influenced by more automatic mechanisms. First, conflict adaptation is strongest at short interstimulus intervals (∼500 ms) and declines thereafter (36). Here, variance adaptation was observed to occur very rapidly, with maximal effects at prime-target intervals of < 200 ms, and some loss of statistical power by 500 ms. Second, simply cueing participants that a trial will be congruent has an additional facilitatory effect (37).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Priming by the variability of visual information

Michael

Gardelle

Summerfield

2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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According to recent theories, perception relies on summary representations that encode statistical information about the sensory environment. Here, we used perceptual priming to characterize the representations that mediate categorization of a complex visual array. Observers judged the average shape or color of a target visual array that was preceded by an irrelevant prime array. Manipulating the variability of task-relevant and task-irrelevant feature information in the prime and target orthogonally, we found that observers were faster to respond when the variability of feature information in the prime and target arrays matched. Critically, this effect occurred irrespective of whether the element-by-element features in the prime and target array overlapped or not, and was even present when prime and target features were drawn from opposing categories. This "priming by variance" phenomenon occurred with prime-target intervals as short as 100 ms. Further experiments showed that this effect did not depend on resource allocation, and occurred even when prime and target did not share the same spatial location. These results suggest that human observers adapt to the variability of visual information, and provide evidence for the existence of a low-level mechanism by which the range or dispersion of visual information is rapidly extracted. This information may in turn help to set the gain of neuronal processing during perceptual choice.decision making | cognitive control W hat information do sensory systems represent, and how do their computations allow us to make judgments about the external world? Canonical theories in perception and cognition suggest that visual neurons code exhaustively for the features or objects that populate natural scenes, from primitive colors and shapes to complex high-dimensional items, such as faces (1, 2). However, any theory of visual representation must account for two striking findings. First, visual judgments can be remarkably blind to local detail: for example, when observers fail to notice the removal of an object from a cluttered natural image, at least when it is outside of the focus of attention (3, 4). Second, both humans and monkeys are extremely good at extracting high-level information (e.g., the presence of an animal or a navigable path) from a scene in a single, rapid glance, despite the almost endless variability in natural images (5-10). One alternative theory that can account for both of these findings argues that the visual system rapidly computes "summary" statistical information about a scene (e.g., the average size of all of the round objects) as opposed to specific features (e.g., the presence of a large round object) (11-13). Encoding summary statistics might offer a crude but efficient representation of the visual world (14) that would facilitate rapid, accurate decisions that are critical for survival (e.g., whether to flee in the face of impending predation, and which route to take), but at the cost of discarding visual detail outside of the focus of attention. ...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Priming by the variability of visual information

Michael

Gardelle

Summerfield

2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…Previous research has shown that interference is smaller when trial N-1 is incongruent (known as a congruency sequence effect (CSE)). CSEs were calculated using the criteria employed by Egner et al (2010), excluding the first trial from every block and any trials on which the word or response on trial N-1 was repeated on trial N, which left 27.8% of data for the analysis. We compared the magnitude of Stroop interference from trials that followed a neutral trial to Stroop interference from trials that followed an incongruent trial, and subtracted the latter from the former (i.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early Stage Animal Hoarders: Are These Owners of Large Numbers of Adequately Cared for Cats?

Ramos¹,

Cruz²,

Ellis³

et al. 2013

PsycEXTRA Dataset

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“…For instance, Egner, Ely, and Grinband (2010;see also, Egner, 2011;Egner, Etkin, Gale, & Hirsch, 2008;Egner & Hirsch, 2005;Etkin, Egner, Peraza, Kandel, & Hirsch, 2006) gave participants a two-choice gender task in which they had to decide whether a facial picture was male or female. The distracting word "male" or "female" was presented overtop of the picture, thus creating congruent trials (i.e., when the picture and word were the same gender) and incongruent trials (i.e., when the picture and word were different genders).…”

Section: Grattonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Questioning conflict adaptation: proportion congruent and Gratton effects reconsidered

2013

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Conflict adaptation is one of the most popular ideas in cognitive psychology. It purports to explain a wide range of data, including both brain and behavioural data from the proportion congruent and Gratton paradigms. However, in recent years many concerns about the viability of this account have been raised. It has been argued that contingency learning, not conflict adaptation, produces the proportion congruent effect. Similarly, the Gratton paradigm has been shown to contain several confounds, most notably feature repetition biases. Newer work on temporal learning further questions the interpretability of the behavioural results of conflict adaptation studies. Brain data linking supposed conflict adaptation to the anterior cingulated cortex (ACC) has also come into question, as this area seems to be solely responsive to time-ontask rather than conflict. This review points to the possibility that conflict adaptation may simply be an illusion. However, the extant data remain ambiguous and there are a lot of open questions that still need to be addressed in future research. QUESTIONING CONFLICT ADAPTATION 3 Questioning Conflict Adaptation: Proportion Congruent and Gratton Effects ReconsideredThe role of cognitive control in basic mental functions is one of the primary questions of interest for cognitive psychologists. One of the most popular ideas in the literature is conflict adaptation, the idea that we deal with conflict between stimuli in our environment by shifting attention away from the source of conflict and toward the stimulus we wish to process. The Stroop paradigm (Stroop, 1935) offers the most common way of studying conflict adaptation. In this task, participants identify the print colour of a colour word. Response times and error rates are increased to incongruent stimuli (e.g., the word BLUE printed in red; BLUE red ) relative to congruent stimuli (e.g., BLUE blue ). Other commonly used paradigms included the Eriksen flanker task (Eriksen & Eriksen, 1974), in which congruent or incongruent distracting letters (or words) are presented on either side of a centrally-located target letter (or word); and the Simon task (Simon & Rudell, 1967), in which a distracting stimulus location is either congruent or incongruent with the response that needs to be made to the target (e.g., a left keypress for a stimulus on the right side of the screen). In paradigms such as these, evidence for conflict adaptation comes from the observation that the size of the congruency effect can be altered in response to changes in conflict. In particular, this paper discusses the proportion congruent and Gratton paradigms.Conflict adaptation theory has a lot of explanatory power. However, the goal of this paper is to explore whether or not conflict adaptation must be assumed in order to explain such phenomena as the proportion congruent and Gratton effects. Some of the mounting evidence against the highly popular conflict adaptation account will be discussed and it will be argued that simpler, non-conflict learning and...

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Going, going, gone: characterizing the time-course of congruency sequence effects

Cited by 124 publications

References 38 publications

Priming by the variability of visual information

Priming by the variability of visual information

Early Stage Animal Hoarders: Are These Owners of Large Numbers of Adequately Cared for Cats?

Questioning conflict adaptation: proportion congruent and Gratton effects reconsidered

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