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 bottomup engagement of cognitive control. The implications for current models of cognitive control are discussed.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 1920-1930 |
Number of pages | 11 |
Journal | Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology |
Volume | 68 |
Issue number | 9 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jan 28 2015 |
Keywords
- Categorization
- Cognitive control
- Context-specific congruency proportion
- Implicit learning
- Selective attention
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Physiology
- Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology
- Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
- General Psychology
- Physiology (medical)