Proportion of conflict, contingency learning, and recency effects in a Stroop task

Abstract

Recent research on the relation between learning and cognitive control has assumed that conflict modulates learning, either by increasing arousal and hence improving learning in high-conflict situations, or by inducing control, and hence inhibiting the processing of distracters and their eventual association with the imperative responses. We analyse whether the amount of conflict, manipulated through the proportion of congruency in a set of Stroop inducer trials, affects learning of contingencies established on diagnostic trials composed by neutral words associated with colour responses. The results reproduced the list-wide proportion of congruency effect on the inducer trials, and showed evidence of contingency learning on the diagnostic trials, but provided no indication that this learning was modulated by the level of conflict. Specific analyses conducted to control for the impact of episodic effects on the expression of learning indicated that contingency effects were not driven by the incremental processes that could be expected by associative learning, but rather they were due to the impact of the most recent trial involving the same distracter. Accordingly, these effects disappeared when tested selectively on trials that required a non-matching response with respect to the previous occurrence of the distracter. We interpret this result in the context of the debate on how learning and memory interact with the processes of cognitive control.