Jiménez, L. & Méndez, A.
Universidad de Santiago, Spain
Congruency effects arise when the processing of an irrelevant dimension facilitates responding to another dimension of the stimulus (e.g. Stroop effect). This effect has been described as automatic, in that it is obtained even when people are trying not to rely on the irrelevant word meaning. However, this congruency effect can be dynamically modulated by context factors such as the nature of the previous trials. The sequential congruency (SC) effect thus refers to the fact that this effect of congruency grows larger after a congruent trial than after a non-congruent trial. The SC effect has been taken as a paradigmatic case of control of automatic tendencies, and it has received considerable attention in the literature on cognitive control. In this talk, we will discuss on the nature of this SC effect, which has been attributed to the effect of overt repetition expectancies, to repetition priming, or to a dynamic regulation of control produced as a result of a continuous monitoring of the conflict produced over the previous trials. We will report on a series of experiments in which we controlled for the effects of repetition priming, and dissociated participants’ expectancies from the SC effect. Specifically, we relied on the gambler’s fallacy to show that expectancies can grow in a direction opposite to that predicted by the SC effect. We also manipulated the learning of sequential contingencies to produce either implicit or explicit “expectancies”, and analyzed the interaction between these learned effects and the effects of SC. The results are discussed in terms of a view of control as arising continuously from the processing of the context at a hierarchy of levels, and in which conscious expectancies are seen more as a single piece of the whole picture, rather than as the top layer playing the starring role of metacognition.