Increasing control improves further control, but it does not enhance memory for the targets in a face–word Stroop task

Abstract

Recent research on the dynamics between attentional and memory processes have outlined the idea that applying control in a conflicting situation directly leads to enhanced episodic memory of the processed information. However, in spite of a small subset of studies supporting this claim, the majority of the evidence in the field seems to support the opposite pattern. In this study, we used a face–word Stroop task to enforce different control modes either from trial to trial or in an item-specific manner. Both manipulations of congruency proved to be effective in making participants’ responses to conflicting stimuli more efficient over time by applying a trial-specific control mode. However, these manipulations had no impact on memory performance on a surprise recognition memory test. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt at measuring the memory consequences of the application of specific control modes at the trial level. The results reported here call for caution and possibly reconceptualization of the relationship between cognitive control and memory.

Pursuing unusual goals (e.g., throwing a new sequence of punches when boxing or including new moves in your tango sequence) is more demanding than performing comparatively more habitual goals (e.g., sticking to your old moves in both scenarios) because to reach infrequent goals, performers have to take every step required to accomplish such goals and also prevent the potential intrusion coming from more habitual actions performed in those contexts. The processes recruited to overcome the conflict between alternative action courses are collectively referred to as “cognitive control,” and they have been explored systematically by means of interference lab tasks such as Stroop (MacLeod, 1992; Stroop, 1935), flanker (Eriksen & Eriksen, 1974), or Simon (Simon & Berbaum, 1990) tasks. For instance, in a Stroop task, if a participant is told to respond to a word denoting a color by referring to the color in which it is printed, its semantic content leads to an interference that is measured as the difference in reaction times between the conditions in which both features are congruent or incongruent with each other.

One important result from the literature on cognitive control is that the efficiency of control processes is not invariant, but is rather subject to systematic changes. Thus, the effect of congruency decreases immediately after responding to an incongruent trial (i.e., the congruency sequence effect, or CSE; Gratton, Coles, & Donchin, 1992), or after responding to a large proportion of incongruent trials over a given block (i.e., list-wide proportion congruency effect, or LWPCE; Logan & Zbrodoff, 1979), a specific context (context-specific proportion congruency effect, or CSPCE; Crump, Gong, & Milliken, 2006), or even for a specific item (item-specific proportion congruency effect, or ISPCE; Jacoby, Lindsay, & Hessels, 2003). Thus, it appears that the efficiency of cognitive control becomes finely attuned to the previous experience, and it improves precisely in those conditions in which it becomes challenged