Performance feedback promotes proactive but not reactive adaptation of conflict-control.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Experimental Psychology

Background:

• Cognitive control uses internal goals to guide stimulus processing, applied proactively or reactively.
• Control can be learned from task statistics, like trial difficulty, but learning boundaries are unclear.
• Performance feedback's role in shaping cognitive control learning requires further investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how performance feedback influences control-learning.
• To differentiate the effects of feedback on proactive versus reactive cognitive control.
• To examine feedback's impact on adapting to item-specific and list-wide task statistics.

Main Methods:

• Used a Stroop task with item-specific (reactive) and list-wide (proactive) proportion congruency manipulations.
• Assessed the influence of performance feedback on control-learning across four experiments (1a, 1b, 2a, 2b).
• Compared the modulation of the Stroop effect with and without performance feedback.

Main Results:

• Performance feedback did not alter the Stroop effect modulation by item-specific cueing (reactive control).
• Feedback significantly enhanced the Stroop effect modulation by list-wide context (proactive control).
• Feedback selectively promoted proactive adaptation of cognitive control, not reactive adaptation.

Conclusions:

• Performance feedback selectively enhances proactive control-learning, aiding adaptation to global task contexts.
• Reactive control adaptation, guided by item-specific cues, is not significantly affected by performance feedback.
• Findings have implications for experimental design, psychiatric treatments, and understanding control-learning mechanisms.