Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University Ghent, Belgium ; Department of Experimental Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University Ghent, Belgium.
Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University Ghent, Belgium.
Front Psychol. 2014 Oct 8;5:1134. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01134. eCollection 2014.
Over the past decade, many cognitive control researchers have studied to what extent adaptations to conflict are domain-general or rather specific, mostly by testing whether or not the congruency sequence effect (CSE) transfers across different conditions (e.g., conflict type, task sets, contexts, et cetera). The CSE refers to the observation that congruency effects in conflict tasks tend to be reduced following incongruent relative to following congruent trials, and is considered a prime measure of cognitive control. By investigating the transfer of this CSE across different conflict types, tasks, or contexts, researchers made several inferences about the scope of cognitive control. This method gained popularity during the last few years, spawning an interesting, yet seemingly inconsistent set of results. Consequently, these observations gave rise to a number of equally divergent theories about the determinants and scope of conflict adaptation. In this review, we offer a systematic overview of these past studies, as well as an evaluation of the theories that have been put forward to account for the results. Finally, we propose an integration of these various theoretical views in a unifying framework that centers on the role of context (dis)similarity. This framework allows us to generate new predictions about the relation between task or context similarity and the scope of cognitive control. Specifically, while most theories imply that increasing contextual differences will result in reduced transfer of the CSE, we propose that context similarity and across-context control follow a U-shaped function instead.
在过去的十年中，许多认知控制研究人员研究了适应冲突在多大程度上是普遍的，或者更具体地说，是特定的，主要通过测试一致性序列效应 (CSE) 是否跨不同条件（例如，冲突类型、任务集、上下文等）转移。CSE 是指观察到在冲突任务中，与一致试验相比，不一致试验后的一致性效应往往会降低，并且被认为是认知控制的主要衡量标准。通过研究这种 CSE 在不同冲突类型、任务或上下文中的转移，研究人员对认知控制的范围做出了一些推断。这种方法在过去几年中变得流行起来，产生了一组有趣但似乎不一致的结果。因此，这些观察结果引发了许多关于冲突适应的决定因素和范围的同样不同的理论。在这篇综述中，我们对这些过去的研究进行了系统的概述，并对为解释这些结果而提出的理论进行了评估。最后，我们在一个以上下文（不）相似性为中心的统一框架中整合了这些不同的理论观点。该框架使我们能够对任务或上下文相似性与认知控制范围之间的关系产生新的预测。具体来说，虽然大多数理论都意味着增加上下文差异会导致 CSE 的转移减少，但我们提出，上下文相似性和跨上下文控制遵循 U 形函数。
