Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Piazza dell'Ateneo Nuovo 1, 20126, Milano, MI, Italy.
Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A 5C2, Canada.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2024 May;86(4):1259-1286. doi: 10.3758/s13414-024-02892-9. Epub 2024 Apr 30.
Conflict-induced control refers to humans' ability to regulate attention in the processing of target information (e.g., the color of a word in the color-word Stroop task) based on experience with conflict created by distracting information (e.g., an incongruent color word), and to do so either in a proactive (preparatory) or a reactive (stimulus-driven) fashion. Interest in conflict-induced control has grown recently, as has the awareness that effects attributed to those processes might be affected by conflict-unrelated processes (e.g., the learning of stimulus-response associations). This awareness has resulted in the recommendation to move away from traditional interference paradigms with small stimulus/response sets and towards paradigms with larger sets (at least four targets, distractors, and responses), paradigms that allow better control of non-conflict processes. Using larger sets, however, is not always feasible. Doing so in the Stroop task, for example, would require either multiple arbitrary responses that are difficult for participants to learn (e.g., manual responses to colors) or non-arbitrary responses that can be difficult for researchers to collect (e.g., vocal responses in online experiments). Here, we present a spatial version of the Stroop task that solves many of those problems. In this task, participants respond to one of six directions indicated by an arrow, each requiring a specific, non-arbitrary manual response, while ignoring the location where the arrow is displayed. We illustrate the usefulness of this task by showing the results of two experiments in which evidence for proactive and reactive control was obtained while controlling for the impact of non-conflict processes.
冲突引发的控制是指人类根据干扰信息（例如，不一致的颜色词）引起的冲突经验，调节对目标信息（例如，颜色词中的颜色）加工过程中注意力的能力，并且以主动（预备）或被动（刺激驱动）的方式进行调节。最近，人们对冲突引发的控制产生了兴趣，并且意识到归因于这些过程的效应可能会受到与冲突无关的过程的影响（例如，刺激-反应联想的学习）。这种意识导致人们建议远离传统的小刺激/反应集的干扰范式，转而采用具有更大刺激集（至少四个目标、分心物和反应）的范式，这些范式可以更好地控制非冲突过程。然而，使用更大的刺激集并不总是可行的。例如，在 Stroop 任务中这样做，要么需要参与者难以学习的多个任意反应（例如，对颜色的手动反应），要么需要研究人员难以收集的非任意反应（例如，在线实验中的口头反应）。在这里，我们提出了 Stroop 任务的空间版本，该版本解决了许多这些问题。在这个任务中，参与者对箭头指示的六个方向之一做出反应，每个方向都需要特定的、非任意的手动反应，同时忽略箭头显示的位置。我们通过展示两个实验的结果来说明这个任务的有用性，这两个实验获得了主动和被动控制的证据，同时控制了非冲突过程的影响。
