Trial-by-trial adjustments in control triggered by incidentally encoded semantic cues

Abstract

Cognitive control mechanisms provide the flexibility to rapidly adapt to contextual demands. These contexts can be defined by top-down goals—but also by bottom-up perceptual factors, such as the location at which a visual stimulus appears. There are now several experiments reporting contextual control effects. Such experiments establish that contexts defined by low-level perceptual cues such as the location of a visual stimulus can lead to context-specific control, suggesting a relatively early focus for cognitive control. The current set of experiments involved a word–word interference task designed to assess whether a high-level cue, the semantic category to which a word belongs, can also facilitate contextual control. Indeed, participants exhibit a larger Flanker effect to items pertaining to a semantic category in which 75% of stimuli are incongruent than in response to items pertaining to a category in which 25% of stimuli are incongruent. Thus, both low-level and high-level stimulus features can affect the bottom-up engagement of cognitive control. The implications for current models of cognitive control are discussed.

Keywords:

• Context-specific congruency proportion
• Cognitive control
• Selective attention
• Categorization
• Implicit learning

C.B. was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. The research was conducted while the first author was working at University of California (UC) Berkeley with support from UC Berkeley research funds. The authors declare no conflict of interest in the dissemination of this work.