Proportion of conflict, contingency learning, and recency effects in a Stroop task.

Recent research on the relation between learning and cognitive control has assumed that conflict modulates learning, either by increasing arousal and hence improving learning in high-conflict situations, or by inducing control, and hence inhibiting the processing of distracters and their eventual association with the imperative responses. We analyse whether the amount of conflict, manipulated through the proportion of congruency in a set of Stroop inducer trials, affects learning of contingencies established on diagnostic trials composed by neutral words associated with colour responses. The results reproduced the list-wide proportion of congruency effect on the inducer trials, and showed evidence of contingency learning on the diagnostic trials, but provided no indication that this learning was modulated by the level of conflict.

Increasing control improves further control, but it does not enhance memory for the targets in a face-word Stroop task.

Recent research on the dynamics between attentional and memory processes have outlined the idea that applying control in a conflicting situation directly leads to enhanced episodic memory of the processed information. However, in spite of a small subset of studies supporting this claim, the majority of the evidence in the field seems to support the opposite pattern. In this study, we used a face-word Stroop task to enforce different control modes either from trial to trial or in an item-specific manner.