Exploring Behavioral Adjustments of Proportion Congruency Manipulations in an Eriksen Flanker Task with Visual and Auditory Distractor Modalities

Overview

Journal Mem Cognit

Specialty Psychology

Date 2023 Aug 7

PMID 37548866

Authors

Linda C Brautigam

Hartmut Leuthold

Ian G Mackenzie

Victor Mittelstadt

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

The present study investigated global behavioral adaptation effects to conflict arising from different distractor modalities. Three experiments were conducted using an Eriksen flanker paradigm with constant visual targets, but randomly varying auditory or visual distractors. In Experiment 1, the proportion of congruent to incongruent trials was varied for both distractor modalities, whereas in Experiments 2A and 2B, this proportion congruency (PC) manipulation was applied to trials with one distractor modality (inducer) to test potential behavioral transfer effects to trials with the other distractor modality (diagnostic). In all experiments, mean proportion congruency effects (PCEs) were present in trials with a PC manipulation, but there was no evidence of transfer to diagnostic trials in Experiments 2A and 2B. Distributional analyses (delta plots) provided further evidence for distractor modality-specific global behavioral adaptations by showing differences in the slope of delta plots with visual but not auditory distractors when increasing the ratio of congruent trials. Thus, it is suggested that distractor modalities constrain global behavioral adaptation effects due to the learning of modality-specific memory traces (e.g., distractor-target associations) and/or the modality-specific cognitive control processes (e.g., suppression of modality-specific distractor-based activation). Moreover, additional analyses revealed partial transfer of the congruency sequence effect across trials with different distractor modalities suggesting that distractor modality may differentially affect local and global behavioral adaptations.

Citing Articles

Visual dominance of the congruency sequence effect in a cross-modal context.

Tang X, Zhang X, Wang T, Yu H, Wang A, Zhang M Front Psychol. 2025; 15:1504068.

PMID: 39744030 PMC: 11688488. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1504068.

Proactive reward in conflict tasks: Does it only enhance general performance or also modulate conflict effects?.

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PMID: 38914923 PMC: 11410886. DOI: 10.3758/s13414-024-02896-5.

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