Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
PLoS One. 2021 Jul 30;16(7):e0255430. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0255430. eCollection 2021.
Motivation signals have been shown to influence the engagement of cognitive control processes. However, most studies focus on the invigorating effect of reward prospect, rather than the reinforcing effect of reward feedback. The present study aimed to test whether people strategically adapt conflict processing when confronted with condition-specific congruency-reward contingencies in a manual Stroop task. Results show that the size of the Stroop effect can be affected by selectively rewarding responses following incongruent versus congruent trials. However, our findings also suggest important boundary conditions. Our first two experiments only show a modulation of the Stroop effect in the first half of the experimental blocks, possibly due to our adaptive threshold procedure demotivating adaptive behavior over time. The third experiment showed an overall modulation of the Stroop effect, but did not find evidence for a similar modulation on test items, leaving open whether this effect generalizes to the congruency conditions, or is stimulus-specific. More generally, our results are consistent with computational models of cognitive control and support contemporary learning perspectives on cognitive control. The findings also offer new guidelines and directions for future investigations on the selective reinforcement of cognitive control processes.
动机信号已被证明会影响认知控制过程的参与。然而,大多数研究都集中在奖励预期的激励作用上,而不是奖励反馈的强化作用上。本研究旨在测试在手动 Stroop 任务中面对特定条件的一致性-奖励关联时,人们是否会策略性地调整冲突处理。结果表明,当对不一致和一致的试验后选择性地奖励反应时,可以影响 Stroop 效应的大小。然而,我们的研究结果也表明了重要的边界条件。我们的前两个实验仅在实验块的前半部分显示了 Stroop 效应的调节,这可能是由于我们的自适应阈值程序随着时间的推移降低了自适应行为的动力。第三个实验显示了 Stroop 效应的整体调节,但在测试项目上没有发现类似调节的证据,这使得该效应是否适用于一致性条件或是否具有刺激特异性存在争议。更一般地说,我们的结果与认知控制的计算模型一致,并支持认知控制的当代学习观点。这些发现还为未来对认知控制过程的选择性强化的研究提供了新的指导方针和方向。