Lierde Elke Van, Desender Kobe, den Bussche Eva Van
Department of Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel Brussels, Belgium ; Department of Experimental-Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University Ghent, Belgium.
Department of Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel Brussels, Belgium.
Front Psychol. 2015 Feb 2;5:1358. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01358. eCollection 2014.
For decades, cognitive adaptation to response conflict has been considered to be the hallmark of cognitive control. Notwithstanding a vast amount of evidence ruling out low-level interpretations of these findings, disbelief still exists with regard to the underlying cause of the observed effects. Especially when considering cognitive adaptation to unconscious conflict, it is still a matter of debate whether repetitions of features between trials might explain this intriguing finding rather than the involvement of unconscious control. To this purpose, we conducted two masked priming experiments in which four different responses to four different stimuli were required. This allowed us to completely eliminate repetitions of prime and target over consecutive trials. Independent of whether conflicting information was presented clearly visible or almost imperceptible, the results showed an unexpected pattern. Contrary to the regular congruency sequence effect (CSE; i.e., classic Gratton effect), in both experiments the congruency effect increased following incongruent trials. Interestingly, this reversed effect completely disappeared when we eliminated all trials with feature repetitions from the analysis. A third experiment, in which feature repetitions were excluded a priori, showed a small but regular CSE in the error rates only. Given that feature repetitions are theoretically thought to create a regular CSE, our results are not in line with an interpretation in terms of feature repetitions nor with an interpretation in terms of cognitive control. We conclude that examining cognitive adaptation with or without feature repetitions might be more difficult to conceive than is often suggested in the literature.
几十年来，认知对反应冲突的适应一直被视为认知控制的标志。尽管有大量证据排除了对这些发现的低层次解释，但对于所观察到的效应的潜在原因仍存在怀疑。特别是在考虑对无意识冲突的认知适应时，试验之间特征的重复是否可以解释这一有趣的发现，而非无意识控制的参与，仍是一个有争议的问题。为此，我们进行了两项掩蔽启动实验，其中要求对四种不同的刺激做出四种不同的反应。这使我们能够在连续试验中完全消除启动刺激和目标刺激的重复。无论冲突信息是清晰可见还是几乎难以察觉，结果都呈现出一种意想不到的模式。与常规的一致性序列效应（CSE；即经典的格拉顿效应）相反，在两项实验中，不一致试验后一致性效应均增加。有趣的是，当我们从分析中排除所有具有特征重复的试验时，这种反转效应完全消失了。第三个实验事先排除了特征重复，结果仅在错误率上显示出小而常规的CSE。鉴于理论上认为特征重复会产生常规的CSE，我们的结果既不符合基于特征重复的解释，也不符合基于认知控制的解释。我们得出结论，考察有无特征重复情况下的认知适应可能比文献中经常提到的更难理解。
