Measuring Adaptive Control in Conflict Tasks

Abstract

The past two decades have witnessed an explosion of interest in the cognitive and neural mechanisms of adaptive control processes that operate in selective attention tasks. This has spawned not only a large empirical literature and several theories but also the recurring identification of potential confounds and corresponding adjustments in task design to create confound-minimized metrics of adaptive control. The resulting complexity of this literature can be difficult to navigate for new researchers entering the field, leading to suboptimal study designs. To remediate this problem, we present here a consensus view among opposing theorists that specifies how researchers can measure four hallmark indices of adaptive control (the congruency sequence effect, and list-wide, context-specific, and item-specific proportion congruency effects) while minimizing easy-to-overlook confounds.

Keywords: cognitive control; conflict adaptation; executive function; interference effects.

Figure 1.. Different indices of adaptive control in the Stroop task.

For each measure, dashed screens indicate the use of diagnostic items to study adaptive changes in behavior that were triggered by different items. Note that for the examples B-D diagnostic items are usually randomly presented among the other items (not only at the end of a run), which is here not the case for reasons of figure space. A. The congruency sequence effect measures adaptive changes following incongruent versus congruent trials. B. The proportion congruency effect measures adaptations in control in blocks where mostly congruent trials are presented (left) versus blocks where mostly incongruent trials are presented (right). C. The context-specific proportion congruency effect investigates adaptive control in contexts associated with mostly incongruent items (e.g., stimuli presented at the top of the screen) versus contexts with mostly congruent items (e.g., stimuli presented at the bottom of the screen). D. The item-specific proportion congruency effect probes adaptations in control to item features that are presented under mostly incongruent conditions (i.e., the ink colors red and yellow) versus item features presented in mostly congruent conditions (i.e., the ink colors blue and green).

Figure 2.. Behavioral indices of adaptive control.

The four performance indices are characterized by a reduction in the congruency effect either following incongruent versus congruent trials (i.e., congruency sequence effect), or in mostly incongruent versus mostly congruent conditions (i.e., proportion congrueny effects; PCEs). The interaction depicted in this figure represents a generic form—the actual form of the interaction may vary from one index to another

Figure I.

An abstract schematic depiction of four major groups of theories on adaptive control.