The unique effects of relatively recent conflict on cognitive control

In tasks like Stroop, it is well documented that cognitive control is affected by experiences with past conflict on 2 timescales. The "immediate" timescale is evidenced by congruency sequence effects while the "long" timescale is evidenced by list-wide proportion congruence effects. What remains underspecified is whether relatively recent experiences with conflict (i.e. recent timescale of a few preceding trials) also uniquely affect control and how experiences on different timescales are weighted. We conducted 3 preregistered experiments using a novel Stroop paradigm designed to isolate the effects of the recent timescale and measured cognitive control via diagnostic items. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the level of conflict experienced in the recent timescale within mostly congruent and mostly incongruent lists. Controlling for conflict experiences in the long and immediate timescales, we found that conflict in the recent timescale affected cognitive control and did so similarly across list types. In Experiment 2 we found a boundary condition for the effects of recent conflict -when the recent timescale was preceded by 50% congruent trials, conflict in the recent timescale did not affect cognitive control. Experiment 3 systematically replicated the findings of Experiment 1 and demonstrated that conflict in the recent timescale affected cognitive control even after a long unfilled delay between recent conflict and subsequent diagnostic trials. These novel findings expand understanding of how conflict experiences in the recent timescale affect cognitive control and highlight the need to expand theories of cognitive control to incorporate the recent timescale and its interaction with other timescales. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).