Abstract

Prior work using 4-choice conflict tasks has shown that pre-cues signaling the congruency of the following trial tend to produce robust pre-cue benefits (i.e., faster RTs relative to uninformative pre-cues) for congruent but not incongruent trials. The scarcity of evidence for pre-cue benefits on incongruent trials raises the question of whether people can adjust cognitive control on demand, given that incongruent trials uniquely require participants to enact an abstract control setting to ignore the goal irrelevant feature and focus on the goal relevant feature when presented with the pre-cue. One potential explanation is that participants are not sufficiently motivated to engage costly control in response to the incongruent pre-cue. The goal of this study was to examine whether incentivizing performance may overcome this motivational constraint in a trial-level pre-cueing paradigm using the Stroop task. A 1,100 ms cue-to-stimulus-interval was employed to see if participants would demonstrate an incongruent trial pre-cue benefit under conditions in which such a benefit has not been previously observed (Bugg & Smallwood, 2016). Across three experiments, the findings consistently illustrated a pre-cue benefit for congruent and most importantly, incongruent trials. Surprisingly, this effect was observed in reward and no-reward conditions in the first two experiments; however, it was isolated to reward conditions in the third experiment. These findings provide initial support for the role of motivation in on-demand adjustments in control in response to incongruent pre-cues.

Committee Chair

Julie Bugg

Committee Members

Todd Braver, Richard Abrams

Degree

Master of Arts (AM/MA)

Author's Department

Psychology

Author's School

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Document Type

Thesis

Date of Award

Winter 12-2025

Language

English (en)

Author's ORCID

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0824-5208

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