Transfer of cognitive control adjustments within and between speakers

Area of Science:

• Cognitive psychology
• Auditory perception
• Human-computer interaction

Background:

• Congruency sequence effects (CSE) reveal cognitive control adjustments between trials.
• The control-retrieval account suggests control is context-bound and retrieved upon feature repetition.
• Previous research focused on stimulus-response (S-R) sets, leaving abstract contextual features under-explored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if abstract contextual features, specifically speaker gender, influence the confound-minimized congruency sequence effect (CSE).
• To test the control-retrieval account's prediction regarding context feature repetition in auditory conflict tasks.
• To examine the role of abstract contextual features in maintaining memory traces during auditory conflict processing.

Main Methods:

• Two preregistered auditory prime-probe experiments were conducted.
• Participants classified color words spoken by either a female or male voice.
• Confound-minimized and S-R repeating conditions were analyzed to assess CSE variations.

Main Results:

• Confound-minimized CSEs were not significantly affected by speaker gender repetition or change.
• When S-R sets repeated, CSEs were larger with speaker gender repetition compared to change.
• These findings held even when considering learning and test episodes separated by an intervening episode.

Conclusions:

• Speaker gender transitions minimally impact control adjustment transfer in the absence of S-R repetitions.
• Speaker gender can influence transfer when bottom-up memory processes are allowed (S-R repetition).
• The control-retrieval account requires refinement to incorporate abstract contextual features in auditory conflict processing memory traces.