Bugg Julie M, Smallwood Alicia
Department of Psychology, Washington University in St. Louis, Campus Box 1125, One Brookings Dr., St. Louis, MO, 63130, USA.
Department of Psychology, DePauw University, Greencastle, USA.
Psychol Res. 2016 Jan;80(1):16-33. doi: 10.1007/s00426-014-0638-5. Epub 2014 Dec 19.
The dual mechanisms of control account proposed a role for proactive and reactive mechanisms in minimizing or resolving interference in conflict tasks. Proactive mechanisms are activated in advance of stimulus onset and lead to preparatory biasing of attention in a goal-directed fashion. Reactive mechanisms are triggered post-stimulus onset. Using an explicit, trial-by-trial pre-cueing procedure in a 4-choice color-word Stroop task, we investigated effects of congruency pre-cues on cognitive control. Under conditions of stimulus uncertainty (i.e., each word was associated with multiple, equally probable responses), pre-cue benefits were observed on incongruent trials when cues were 100% valid but not when they were 75% valid. These benefits were selectively found at the longest cue-to-stimulus interval (2,000 ms), consistent with a preparation-dependent proactive control mechanism. By contrast, when a reactive strategy of switching attention to the irrelevant dimension to predict the single correlated response was viable, pre-cue benefits were observed on incongruent trials for all cue-to-stimulus intervals including the shortest that afforded only 500 ms to prepare. The findings (a) suggest a restricted role for the preparation-dependent biasing of attention via proactive control in response to explicit, trial-by-trial pre-cues while (b) highlighting strategies that lead to pre-cue benefits but which appear to reflect primarily reactive use of the information afforded by the pre-cues. We conclude that pre-cues, though available in advance of stimulus onset, may stimulate proactive or reactive minimization of interference.
双重控制机制假说提出，主动机制和反应机制在减少或解决冲突任务中的干扰方面发挥着作用。主动机制在刺激出现之前就被激活，并以目标导向的方式导致注意力的预备性偏向。反应机制在刺激出现后被触发。在一项四选一颜色-文字Stroop任务中，我们使用明确的逐次试验前提示程序，研究了一致性前提示对认知控制的影响。在刺激不确定的条件下（即每个单词都与多个同等可能的反应相关联），当提示的有效性为100%时，在不一致试验中观察到前提示益处，但当提示有效性为75%时则未观察到。这些益处仅在最长的提示-刺激间隔（2000毫秒）时被发现，这与一种依赖准备的主动控制机制一致。相比之下，当一种将注意力切换到无关维度以预测单一相关反应的反应策略可行时，在所有提示-刺激间隔的不一致试验中都观察到了前提示益处，包括最短仅提供500毫秒准备时间的间隔。这些发现（a）表明，在响应明确的逐次试验前提示时，通过主动控制对注意力进行依赖准备的偏向作用有限，同时（b）突出了导致前提示益处但似乎主要反映对前提示所提供信息的反应性利用的策略。我们得出结论，前提示虽然在刺激出现之前就可用，但可能会刺激对干扰的主动或反应性最小化。
