He said, she said: Episodic retrieval induces conflict adaptation in an auditory Stroop task

Abstract

People respond more slowly if an irrelevant feature of a target stimulus is incompatible with the relevant feature or the correct response. Such compatibility effects are often reduced in trials following an incompatible trial, which has been taken to reflect increased cognitive control. This pattern holds only if two trials share some similarities, however, suggesting that it may be modulated by the episodic context. To look into this possibility, we had participants respond to high- or low-pitched tones by saying "high" or "low," respectively, and ignore the simultaneously presented auditory word "high" or "low." As expected, performance was impaired if the heard word was incompatible with the required response, and this Stroop-like effect was reduced after incompatible trials. This sequential modulation was observed, however, only if the voice in the two successive trials was the same, whereas no modulation was obtained when the speaker changed. The results suggest that sequential modulations are due to the automatic retrieval of episodic event representations that integrate stimuli, actions, and situational and task-specific control information, so that later reactivation of some elements of a given representation tends to retrieve the other elements as well.

Shielding Voices: The Modulation of Binding Processes between Voice Features and Response Features by Task Representations

“…Therefore it complements previous research that hint at the integration of speaker identity in action effect-bindings (Herwig & Waszak, 2012) and in episodic events of a conflict task (Spapé & Hommel, 2008 made according to the stimulus-response rules. This is in line with studies demonstrating that feature-response bindings also involve irrelevant visual stimulus features (Dreisbach & Haider, 2008;Hommel, 2005), irrelevant nonvocal auditory stimulus features (e.g., Frings et al, 2014;Mayr & Buchner, 2006;Moeller et al, 2012;Zmigrod & Hommel, 2009 or visual distractors (Frings, Rothermund, & Wentura, 2007;Frings & Rothermund, 2011;Giesen, Frings, & Rothermund, 2012).…”

“…These and likewise intertrial effects have been demonstrated for relevant and irrelevant features of visual stimuli (e.g., Dreisbach & Haider, 2008;Hommel & Keizer, 2012;Hommel, 1998;Kahneman et al, 1992;Kleinsorge, 1999;Zehetleitner, Rangelov, & Müller, 2012) and nonvocal auditory stimuli (Frings, Schneider, & Moeller, 2014;Mayr & Buchner, 2006;Moeller, Rothermund, & Frings, 2012;Zmigrod & Hommel, 2009. Although there is already some evidence for the integration of speaker identity in action-effect bindings (Herwig & Waszak, 2012) and in episodic events of a conflict task (Spapé & Hommel, 2008), a systematic investigation of stimulus-response bindings with regard to voice features (e.g., linguistic content, speaker identity, affective information) and action features of spoken words is still lacking. Especially the stimulus-response integration of vocal affective information that is transferred through emotional prosody has not been addressed before.…”

Binding targets’ responses to distractors’ locations: Distractor response bindings in a location-priming task

“…This might have enhanced the salience of the spatial distractor information (because it clearly interfered with responding to the target location; see Frings & Wentura, 2006), and, in turn, binding was more likely (Hommel, 2005). Likewise, Spapé and Hommel (2008) demonstrated that context modulations of cognitive control processes are due to episodic retrieval; that is, they showed that task-specific control information can be integrated together with the stimuli and actions in an event file. Thus, reactivation of a part of such an episode can also retrieve some form of executive control.…”

Selective attention and recognition: effects of congruency on episodic learning

“…For example, it has now been reported that sequential congruency effects can be task-specific, with sequential congruency effects observed for task-repetitions but not task-switches from one trial to the next (Kiesel, Kunde, & Hoffmann, 2006); context-specific, with sequential congruency effects occurring when superficial contextual cues repeat but not when such cues switch from one trial to the next (Spapé & Hommel, 2008); and conflict-type specific, with sequential congruency effects observed when conflict type (e.g., Stroop or Simon) repeats but not when conflict type switches from one trial to the next (Egner, 2008;Funes, Lupiáñez, & Humphreys, 2010;.…”