This study aimed to determine whether attentional prioritization of stimuli associated with reward transfers across conceptual knowledge independently of physical features. Participants successively performed two color-word Stroop tasks. In the learning phase, neutral words were associated with high, low, or no monetary reward. In the…

Repeating a single-prime stimulus as a target to respond to usually facilitates responses. However, sometimes, prime repetition slows the responses and produces the single-prime negative priming effect. In this study, the distractor set hypothesis was proposed as a mechanism of attentional control that can contribute toward single-prime negative…

In the standard Proportion-Congruent (PC) paradigm, performance is compared between a list containing mostly congruent (MC) stimuli (e.g., the word RED in the color red in the Stroop task; Stroop, 1935) and a list containing mostly incongruent (MI) stimuli (e.g., the word BLUE in red). The PC effect, the finding that the congruency effect (i.e.,…

Perspective-taking plays an important role in daily life, allowing consideration of other people's perspectives and viewpoints. This study used a large sample of 265 community-based participants (aged 20-86 years) to examine changes in perspective-taking abilities--a component of "Theory of Mind"--across adulthood, and how these changes…

According to some accounts, the bilingual advantage is most pronounced in the domain of executive attention rather than inhibition and should therefore be more easily detected in conflict adaptation paradigms than in simple interference paradigms. We tested this idea using two conflict adaptation paradigms, one that elicits a list-wide…

Response control or inhibition is one of the cornerstones of modern cognitive psychology, featuring prominently in theories of executive functioning and impulsive behavior. However, repeated failures to observe correlations between commonly applied tasks have led some theorists to question whether common response conflict processes even exist. A…

Previous research has shown that Stroop effects interact with working memory capacity (WMC) more strongly with lists of mostly congruent items. Although the predominant explanation for this relationship is goal maintenance, some research has challenged whether listwide effects truly reflect goal-maintenance abilities. The current study improved…

In this study we sought to determine the effect of daily sucrose consumption in young rats on their subsequent performance in tasks that involve the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. High levels of sugar consumption have been associated with the development of obesity, however less is known about how sugar consumption influences behavioral…

Previous studies using artificial languages suggest that sentence production can be guided by verb-specific as well as verb-general statistics present in the language input. Here we investigated whether the statistical properties of ongoing input in the speakers' native language systematically affected their sentence production. Three experiments…

Cognitive control describes the ability to use internal goals to strategically guide how we process and respond to our environment. Changes in the environment lead to adaptation in control strategies. This type of control learning can be observed in performance adjustments in response to varying proportions of easy to hard trials over blocks of…

In the Stroop task, congruency effects (i.e., the color-naming latency difference between incongruent stimuli, e.g., the word BLUE written in the color red, and congruent stimuli, e.g., RED in red) are smaller in a list in which incongruent trials are frequent than in a list in which incongruent trials are infrequent. The traditional explanation…

Existing approaches in the literature on cognitive control in conflict tasks almost exclusively target the outcome of control (by comparing mean congruency effects) and not the processes that shape control. These approaches are limited in addressing a current theoretical issue--what contribution does learning make to adjustments in cognitive…

Cognitive control can be triggered by explicit or implicit events; it has been proposed that these two possibilities tap into dissociable mechanisms. In this study, we investigate this idea by testing whether young children, who struggle with explicitly triggered control, can demonstrate proportion congruency effects--which are based on implicit…

The congruence effect can be modulated by adjacent conflict conditions, producing the congruency sequence effect (CSE). However, many boundary conditions prevent the transfer of the cross-conflict CSE. A consensus has been achieved that the CSE reflects both top-down control and bottom-up associative learning, but neither perspective could…

By virtue of its frontal and hippocampal connections, the retrosplenial cortex is uniquely placed to support cognition. Here, we tested whether the retrosplenial cortex is required for frontal tasks analogous to the Stroop Test, i.e., for the ability to select between conflicting responses and inhibit responding to task-irrelevant cues. Rats first…