The hot-hand fallacy in cognitive control: Repetition expectancy modulates the congruency sequence effect

Abstract

In this study, the role of expectancies in cognitive control was tested. On the basis of the original interpretation of the congruency sequence effect (Gratton, Coles, & Donchin, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 121:480-506, 1992), we sought evidence for a repetition bias steering attentional control. In a series of four Stroop experiments, we investigated how participants' explicit predictions about the upcoming (in)congruency proactively influenced subsequent Stroop performance. Similar to the fallacious "hot-hand" belief in gambling, repeating stimulus events were overpredicted, as participants consistently expected more repetitions of the congruency level than the actual presented number of congruencylevel repetitions (50 %). Moreover, behavioral adjustments (i.e., a congruency sequence effect) were only found when participants anticipated a congruency-level repetition, whereas no modulation of the Stroop effect was found following alternation predictions. We propose that proactive control processes in general, and repetition expectancy in particular, should be given more attention in current theorizing and modeling of cognitive control, which is characterized by an emphasis on reactive, conflict-induced control adjustments.Keywords Proactive cognitive control . Expectancy bias . Congruency sequence effect . Choice behavior Cognitive control allows us to adaptively adjust to an everchanging environment. Therefore, the cognitive system not only monitors the environment, it also generates predictions. Research has predominantly focused on the monitoring aspect, by studying reactive, postconflict adjustments. Recent influential models (e.g., Alexander & Brown, 2011) have stressed the importance of learning on the basis of predictiondriven outcomes. Still, experimental work on how expectancies can steer attentional control is relatively scarce.Human predictions themselves have been widely investigated. Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky (1982), for instance, convincingly showed that predictions are inherently biased. When predicting random events, people often expect too many alternations (Nickerson, 2002). Faced with a run of "heads" in coin tossing, for example, the gambler will believe that the run will be broken (the gambler's fallacy). On the other hand, one expects a winning poker player to keep on winning (the hot-hand fallacy). According to Kareev (1995), human predictive behavior reveals a tendency toward expecting repeating events, in line with the hot-hand fallacy.These biased predictions can influence reaction times (RTs) in relatively simple tasks. In serial two-choice RT tasks, for example, responses to stimulus repetitions are typically faster than responses to stimulus alternations (e.g., Remington, 1969). Soetens, Boer, and Hueting (1985) explained this repetition effect in terms of subjective expectancy. However, once the intertrial interval was sufficiently stretched, Soetens et al. demonstrated an alternation effect, corresponding to faster responses to different than to repe...

Even with time, conflict adaptation is not made of expectancies

“…In this way, even though our main interest was still focused on the analysis of the CSE observed during the standard Stroop blocks, we were also able to explore the effects of congruency that might be observed on the Expectancy blocks. Duthoo et al (2013) reported that a close association between expectancies and congruency effects was obtained when both measures were taken on the very same trials. Thus, an additional objective of this study was to ascertain whether this association between expectancies and congruency effects could be extended to the regular Stroop trials when participants have enough time to develop a prediction, or whether such association could be rather restricted to conditions in which expectancies were generated in response to explicit task demands.…”

“…The results from Duthoo et al (2013) indicated that expectancies and congruency effects were closely associated when both measures were taken on the very same trials. Thus, to assess whether a similar association could arise over the Expectancy blocks from the present experiment, we classified each trial from the Expectancy blocks in two different categories, depending on whether the participants declared to be expecting a congruent or an incongruent successor, and we looked at the effects of congruency observed in those trials depending on these explicit expectancies.…”

The congruency sequence effect emerges when the distracter precedes the target

“…Second, in two-alternative-forced-choice (2-AFC) tasks, the response expectation hypothesis posits that participants "pre-activate" the response signaled by the distracter if the previous trial was congruent, leading to a relatively large congruency effect, or the opposite response if the previous trial was incongruent, leading to a relatively small congruency effect (Logan, 1985). While this hypothesis was originally formulated in the context of biased proportions of congruent and incongruent trials (Logan & Zbrodoff, 1979), such a strategy may occur even when congruent and incongruent stimuli appear equally often, because participants appear to expect congruency repetitions across consecutive trials more than they expect congruency alternations (Duthoo, Wuhr, & Notebaert, 2013;Gratton et al, 1992). In sum, the response modulation account posits that the CSE occurs when the distracter is processed before the target, such that control processes have time to modulate the distracter response before the target is identified.…”

Beyond trial-by-trial adaptation: A quantification of the time scale of cognitive control.

“…It has been argued that series of (in)congruent trials create expectation and that these expectations drive adaptation on the current trial (Duthoo, Wühr, & Notebaert, 2013). For example, when incongruent trial repetitions are frequent, as is the case in MI blocks, participants might expect another incongruent trial and prepare control accordingly.…”