Control over task conflict in the stroop and affordances tasks: an individual differences study
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Control over task conflict in the stroop and affordances tasks: an individual differences study Ran Littman1 · Eyal Kalanthroff1 Received: 4 December 2019 / Accepted: 26 August 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Task conflict is a type of conflict that emerges when a stimulus triggers two or more competing tasks. In the Stroop task, task conflict occurs between the relevant color-naming task and irrelevant word reading task and can be observed mainly on congruent trials, which only involve task conflict and are devoid of additional conflict types. We hypothesized that task conflict also manifests in the affordances task between the relevant task (e.g., classifying manipulatable objects), and the automatic task afforded by the object (e.g., grasping the object), and is mostly evident on congruent trials. Using an individual differences design we assessed the relationship between control mechanisms operating on Stroop congruent and affordances congruent trials under conditions of high and low cognitive control requirements. We hypothesized that task control is employed in both tasks. One-hundred and twenty-three participants performed an affordances task and two blocks of a Stroop task, each requiring a different level of task control (high vs. low). In a hierarchical regression model, we found a significant and specific correlation between affordances congruent and Stroop congruent conditions only in the high-control block, designed to greatly engage participants’ task control, thus linking the task control mechanism in both tasks. These results indicate that task control underlies diverse modalities of response (visuomotor and linguistic), independently of other conflict types. We suggest that the affordances task may serve as a supplementary tool for the assessment of task control in the lab.
Introduction As proposed by Monsell (2003), task sets can be automatically activated by the perception of a stimulus attribute that is strongly associated with a particular task. Two separate scientific frameworks are based on this idea: The theory of affordances (Gibson, 1979) and the task-conflict model (Kalanthroff, Davelaar, Henik, Goldfarb, & Usher, 2018). In the current study, we investigated the existence of a shared control mechanism that connects these two frameworks. By doing so, we also aimed to validate a supplementary, nonlinguistic tool for the assessment of control over stimulusdriven task conflict in the lab.
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01411-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Ran Littman ran.littman@mail.huji.ac.il 1
Department of Psychology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, Mt. Scopus, 91905 Jerusalem, Israel
Task conflict has been studied mainly using the Stroop task, in which participants are instructed to name the inkcolor of congruent (e.g., RED written in red), incongruent (e.g., BLUE written in red), an
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