The face-specific proportion congruency effect: social stimuli as contextual cues

Abstract

Previous research shows that larger interference is observed in contexts associated with a high proportion of congruent trials than in those associated with a low proportion of congruent trials. Given that one of the most relevant contexts for human beings is social context, researchers have recently explored the possibility that social stimuli could also work as contextual cues for the allocation of attentional control. In fact, it has been shown that individuals use social categories (i.e., men and women) as cues to allocate attentional control. In this work, we go further by showing that individual faces (instead of the social categories they belong to) associated with a high proportion of congruent trials can also lead to larger interference effects compared to individual faces predicting a relatively low proportion of congruent trials. Furthermore, we show that faces associated with a high proportion of congruent trials are more positively evaluated than faces associated with a high proportion of incongruent trials. These results demonstrate that unique human faces are potential contextual cues than can be employed to apply cognitive control when performing an automatic task.

Challenging voices: Mixed evidence for context-specific control adjustments in the auditory domain

“…This is in line with findings from the visual modality which showed PC effects in contexts like face or gender identity before (Cañadas et al, 2016; Jiménez-Moya et al, 2018). Just as in the visual modality, the frequency of conflicting information transferred by a particular voice leads to context (here: voice) control associations that are retrieved by the respective context (see Gottschalk & Fischer, 2017; for reviews, see Bugg, 2012; Bugg & Crump, 2012).…”

“…Schmidt, 2016, 2019). The CSPC in the visual domain is an effect that can generalise to items that do not follow the PC manipulation, but appear on the respective context (Bugg et al, 2011; Cañadas et al, 2013, 2016; Crump & Milliken, 2009; Jiménez-Moya et al, 2018). In order to investigate whether the voice is a sufficient trigger of control adaptation, we re-ran Experiments 1 and 2, this time including frequency unbiased items.…”

“…Consequently, response conflict is reduced at this specific location, but not at the other location. Previous research has shown context-specific adjustments to visual contexts such as colour, shape, and location of items (for a review, see Bugg & Crump, 2012), or even to more complex context features like faces (Cañadas et al, 2013, 2016; Jiménez-Moya et al, 2018). Derived from this research, we here aim to investigate whether human voices (males vs. female) as auditory contexts can also trigger control adjustments.…”

Research thematic and emerging trends of contextual cues: a bibliometrics and visualization approach

“…As individuals are part of a group, interaction with society is an inevitable behavior. Interpersonal exchanges and communication among individuals affect the entire social background; it integrates the characteristics of human nature and social attributes, and individuals are often stimulated by nature and society, thus distracting their attention to contextual cues (Jimenez-Moya et al , 2018), affecting cognition and memory of individual cues. In recent years, mobile Internet has stimulated the development of virtual social network, and a large number of people have formed a huge network society through social software.…”