Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA.
Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg, Department of Psychology, Engelbergerstrasse 41, 79085 Freiburg, Germany.
Cognition. 2020 Jun;199:104220. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104220. Epub 2020 Feb 14.
The repeated pairing of a particular stimulus with a specific cognitive control process, such as task switching, can bind the two together in memory, resulting in the formation of stimulus-control associations. These bindings are thought to guide the context-sensitive application of cognitive control, but it is not presently known whether such stimulus-control associations are only acquired through slow, incremental learning or could also be mediated by episodic memories of a single experience, so-called one-shot learning. Here, we tested this episodic control-binding hypothesis by probing whether a single co-occurrence of a stimulus and the control process of task switching would lead to significant performance benefits (reduced task switch cost) when that stimulus later re-occurred under the same as opposed to different control demands. Across three experiments, we demonstrate that item-specific stimulus-control associations can be formed based on a single exposure, providing the first strong evidence for episodic memory guidance of cognitive control.
特定刺激与特定认知控制过程（如任务切换）的反复配对可以将两者在记忆中绑定在一起，从而形成刺激-控制关联。这些绑定被认为指导了认知控制的上下文敏感应用，但目前尚不清楚这些刺激-控制关联是否仅通过缓慢的增量学习获得，或者是否也可以通过单一经验的情景记忆（所谓的一次性学习）来介导。在这里，我们通过探测当单个刺激和任务切换的控制过程再次出现时，在相同而非不同的控制需求下，这种单一的共同出现是否会导致显著的性能提升（降低任务切换成本），来检验这种情景控制绑定假说。在三个实验中，我们证明了基于单次暴露可以形成特定于项目的刺激-控制关联，为情景记忆对认知控制的指导提供了第一个有力证据。
