Can contingency learning alone account for item-specific control? Evidence from within- and between-language ISPC...

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Experimental Psychology
• Psycholinguistics

Background:

• The item-specific proportion congruence (ISPC) manipulation typically yields greater Stroop interference for mostly congruent items compared to mostly incongruent items.
• This phenomenon has been theoretically linked to dynamic control mechanisms governing word-reading processes.
• A confounding factor in ISPC is the entanglement of item proportion congruence with response contingency, proposing an alternative explanation rooted in learned response contingencies.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether the ISPC effect can be solely explained by stimulus-response contingency learning.
• To determine if other executive control processes contribute to the ISPC effect.
• To differentiate between contingency learning and control processes using a bilingual task with within- and between-language conditions.

Main Methods:

• A bilingual Stroop task was employed, comparing within-language and between-language conditions.
• Experiment 1 assessed contingency learning for non-color words across these conditions.
• Experiment 2 evaluated ISPC effects and contingency learning in both within- and between-language contexts, followed by contingency analyses.

Main Results:

• Contingency learning for non-color words was more pronounced in the within-language condition than the between-language condition.
• Significant ISPC effects were observed in both within- and between-language conditions, with a larger effect in the within-language condition.
• Contingency analyses in Experiment 2 mirrored Experiment 1's findings and did not reveal an interaction between contingency and congruency.

Conclusions:

• The findings suggest that contingency-learning processes are the dominant factor in color-word ISPC effects.
• The results challenge explanations solely based on dynamic control over word-reading.
• Learned stimulus-response associations appear to be the primary mechanism underlying the observed ISPC phenomenon in this bilingual context.