ArticleFrontiers in psychology2014
Creatures of habit (and control): a multi-level learning perspective on the modulation of congruency effects.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 102 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
102 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- The puzzle of profitless pre-cues.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Pooled it
- A domain-general brain network underlying emotional and cognitive interference processing: evidence from coordinate-based and functional connectivity meta-analyses.Brain structure & function · 2018Pooled it
- Transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS) enhances conflict-triggered adjustment of cognitive control.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2018Trial
- Learning-based cognitive control in ADHD: a multicentric study.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2026Article
- Coupling between statistical learning and interference suppression.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Learning and Using Different Task Rule Updating Strategies Require Extensive Practice.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- Adaptive behavior is guided by integrated representations of controlled and non-controlled information.eLife · 2026Article
- Contrasting cognitive control in the Simon and spatial Stroop tasks regarding their interference with the control of standing balance.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Transfer of cognitive control adjustments within and between speakers.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2026Article
- Learning-based cognitive control: developmental trajectories in children aged 5- to 14- years.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- When forewarned is not forearmed: No evidence for cue-based proactive control in the spatial Stroop task.Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance · 2026Article
- Adaptive behavior is guided by integrated representations of controlled and non-controlled information.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Behavioral Interference by Emotional Stimuli: Sequential Modulation by Perceptual Conditions but Not by Emotional Primes.Vision (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- The list-wide proportion congruency effect is larger when the distractor precedes the target: Evidence for conflict-independent control in the prime-probe task.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- Does an external distractor interfere with the triggering of item-specific control?Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance · 2025Article
- A shared temporal window of integration across cognitive control and reinforcement learning paradigms: A correlational study.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- One-shot stimulus-control associations generalize over different stimulus viewpoints and exemplars.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- Beyond stimulus-response rules: Task sets incorporate information about performance difficulty.Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition · 2025Article
- Sequential and domain-specific processing mechanisms for dual cognitive-emotional conflict.Psychological research · 2024Article
- Rare incompatible stimuli evoke visual mismatch negativity in a flanker task.Experimental brain research · 2024Article
42 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Abstract
The congruency sequence effect (CSE) describes the finding that congruency effects in classic probes of selective attention (like the Stroop, Simon, and flanker tasks) are smaller following an incongruent than following a congruent trial. The past two decades have generated a large literature on determinants and boundary conditions for the CSE and similar, congruency-proportion based modulations of congruency effects. A prolonged and heated theoretical discussion has been guided primarily by a historically motivated dichotomy between "top-down control" versus "associative bottom-up" explanations for these effects. In the present article, I attempt to integrate and contextualize the major empirical findings in this field by arguing that CSEs (and related effects) are best understood as reflecting a composite of multiple levels of learning that differ in their level of abstraction. Specifically, learning does not only involve the trial-by-trial encoding, binding, and cued retrieval of specific stimulus-response associations, but also of more abstract trial features. Moreover, these more abstract trial or event features can be both external, such as the spatial and temporal context in which a stimulus occurs, as well as internal, like the experience of difficulty, and the attentional control settings that were employed in dealing with the stimulus. From this perspective, top-down control and bottom-up priming processes work in concert rather than in opposition. They represent different levels of abstraction in the same learning scheme and they serve a single, common goal: forming memory ensembles that will facilitate fast and appropriate responding to recurring stimuli or events in the environment.
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