title: 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.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , Arizona State University , Tempe , AZ, USA.
authors.forename: Chris
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Blais
authors.forename: Michael B
authors.initials: MB
authors.lastname: Harris
authors.forename: Michael H
authors.initials: MH
authors.lastname: Sinanian
authors.forename: Silvia A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Bunge
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001244:Association; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003210:Concept Formation / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010465:Perception / Q000502:physiology; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012660:Semantics; D012917:Social Adjustment; D014825:Vocabulary
keywords: Categorization; Cognitive control; Context-specific congruency proportion; Implicit learning; Selective attention