Proportional Consistency Effect And Its Transfer Based On Implicit Spatial Informatio

Cognitive control is a flexible process that adapts to various tasks and has transferability,One viewpoint posits that cognitive control is general,with similar mechanisms underlying it across different tasks and contexts.The other viewpoint posits that cognitive control is specific,with task-specific adjustments required for different tasks.Current empirical findings support that cognitive control is domain-general or specific,and some research evidence supports the general,specific or both views respectively.Context-specific proportion congruency effect(CSPC)is a common method for studying cognitive control,which is context-dependent,refers to manipulating the proportion of conflict tasks at different positions.If the proportion of congruency trials increases,the conflict effect at the position decreases.In addition,the effect can be transferred to adjacent positions without proportional manipulation,but the transfer can only be observed in the conflict task composed of spatial information,and cannot be observed in the conflict task composed of non-spatial information.The present study aims to investigate whether CSPC effect transfer occurs when implicit spatial information is included in a task.Specifically,Our study will use the CSPC effect as an index to investigate the transferability of cognitive control,focusing on its general and specific aspects.Previous studies have found that sequence information,such as numbers and letters,is implicitly linked to spatial information.In this study,four behavioral experiments were conducted to manipulate the proportions of conflicting tasks in different positions with numbers and letters as stimulus materials,so as to explore whether CSPC effect and its transfer can be generated based on implicit spatial information.Experimental study 1a utilized a digit parity judgment task,and observed the CSPC effect.Experimental study 1b added a spatial transfer test to study the CSPC effect,and observed the CSPC effect but not the transfer effect.Considering that using an odd/even judgment task would require more time for the transformation of stimulus-stimulus representation into spatial representation,Experiment 2a used a digital Flanker task observed CSPC effect,and and the spatial position migration was observed.Experiment 2b used a letter Flanker task,expected to repeat the results of experiment 2a,As a result,no CSPC effect and transfer effect was observed.The results of Experiments 1a,1b,and 2a demonstrate that tasks with spatial information are more likely to show CSPC effects.Experiment 2a is consistent with previous research,showing that CSPC effects have spatial specificity in their transferability.However,it also adds further evidence that when the conflicting task is closely related to the contextual information,transfer can occur even when the spatial information of the stimulus material is implicit.Meanwhile,the results of Experiments 1b and 2b show that sufficient processing of implicit spatial information is required to observe the CSPC effect transfer induced by implicit spatial information.The results of this study provide empirical evidence for the duality hypothesis of cognitive control,which posits that cognitive control exhibits both generality and specificity.Specifically,our findings demonstrate the flexibility of cognitive control.