AN ATTEMPT TO DISSOCIATE CONTINGENCY LEARNING AND ITEM-SPECIFIC CONTROL

Date

2024-1

Author

Bozkurt Ayman, Özge

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Cognitive control is defined as allocating attention to a specific topic in a goal-directed manner. It is indexed by slower reaction times for incongruent Stroop items (e.g., word blue written in red ink) compared to congruent Stroop items (e.g., word blue written in blue ink). In the last decades, it was demonstrated that control could be exerted in an item-specific manner. However, a group of researchers claimed that there was a contingency (frequency/correlation) confound in item-specific control studies, and the observed effects reflected a contingency learning mechanism instead of item-specific control. The current study aims to dissociate control and contingency learning by implementing the premises of the tectonic theory with three experiments. According to the tectonic theory, in the classic color-word Stroop task, there is an imbalance between dimensions. The word dimension is more salient compared to the color dimension, which possibly leads participants to use contingency learning strategies. We attempted to reduce the imbalance between the Stroop dimensions by using a novel word-word Stroop task to prevent participants from using contingency learning strategies and direct them to use item-specific control strategies in Experiments 1 and 3. In Experiment 2, we used the color-word Stroop task to compare the results with Experiments 1 and 3. According to planned analyses, there was no clear evidence regarding the use of control or the difference between color-word and word-word Stroop experiments. However, post-hoc analysis revealed that both contingency learning and control might have been used simultaneously in the word-word Stroop task.

Subject Keywords

cognitive control, proportion congruency, tectonic theory, Stroop task, contingency learning

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/107725

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis