Schmidt James R, Weissman Daniel H
Department of Experimental Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2014 Jul 14;9(7):e102337. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0102337. eCollection 2014.
The congruency effect in distracter interference (e.g., Stroop) tasks is often reduced after incongruent trials, relative to congruent trials. It has been proposed that this congruency sequence effect (CSE) results from trial-by-trial adjustments of attention, which are triggered by changes in response conflict, expectancy, or negative affect. Hence, a large literature has developed to investigate the source(s) of attention adaptation in distracter interference tasks. Recent work, however, suggests that CSEs may stem from feature integration and/or contingency learning processes that are confounded with congruency sequence in the vast majority of distracter interference tasks. By combining an established method for measuring CSEs in the absence of these learning and memory confounds with a prime-probe task, we observed robust CSEs in two experiments. These findings provide strong evidence of CSEs independent of learning and memory confounds, which might be explainable by trial-by-trial adjustments of attention. They also reveal a highly effective approach for observing CSEs independent of the typical confounds, which will facilitate future studies of how people adapt to distraction.
在干扰项干扰任务（如斯特鲁普任务）中，相对于一致试验，不一致试验后干扰项干扰的一致性效应通常会降低。有人提出，这种一致性序列效应（CSE）源于逐次试验的注意力调整，这些调整由反应冲突、预期或负面情绪的变化触发。因此，已经有大量文献来研究干扰项干扰任务中注意力适应的来源。然而，最近的研究表明，在绝大多数干扰项干扰任务中，CSEs可能源于与一致性序列混淆的特征整合和/或偶然学习过程。通过将一种在没有这些学习和记忆混淆因素的情况下测量CSEs的既定方法与一个启动-探测任务相结合，我们在两个实验中观察到了强大的CSEs。这些发现为独立于学习和记忆混淆因素的CSEs提供了强有力的证据，这可能可以通过逐次试验的注意力调整来解释。它们还揭示了一种观察独立于典型混淆因素的CSEs的高效方法，这将有助于未来关于人们如何适应干扰的研究。
