One-shot stimulus-control associations generalize over different stimulus viewpoints and exemplars.

Cognitive control processes are central to adaptive behavior, but how control is applied in a context-appropriate manner is not fully understood. One way to produce context-sensitive control is by mnemonically linking particular control settings to specific stimuli that demanded those settings in a prior encounter. In support of this episodic reinstatement of control hypothesis, recent studies have produced evidence for the formation of stimulus-control associations in one-shot, prime-probe learning paradigms. However, since those studies employed perceptually identical stimuli across prime and probe presentations, it is not yet known how generalizable one-shot stimulus-control associations are. In the current study, we therefore probed whether associations formed between a prime object and the control process of task-switching would generalize to probe objects seen from a different viewpoint (Experiment 1), to different exemplars of the same object type (Experiment 2), and to different members of the object category (Experiment 3). We replicated prior findings of one-shot control associations for identical prime/probe stimuli. Importantly, we additionally found that these episodic control effects are expressed regardless of changes in viewpoint and exemplar, but do not seem to generalize to other category members. These findings elucidate the scope of generalization of the episodic reinstatement of cognitive control.