The role of spatial uncertainty in the context-specific proportion congruency effect


Bozkurt Ö., Mısırlısoy Bıyıkoğlu M., Atalay N. B.

Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol.86, no.4, pp.1206-1221, 2024 (SCI-Expanded) identifier identifier identifier

  • Publication Type: Article / Article
  • Volume: 86 Issue: 4
  • Publication Date: 2024
  • Doi Number: 10.3758/s13414-024-02865-y
  • Journal Name: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics
  • Journal Indexes: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Scopus, Academic Search Premier, IBZ Online, International Bibliography of Social Sciences, PASCAL, BIOSIS, EMBASE, Linguistics & Language Behavior Abstracts, MEDLINE, MLA - Modern Language Association Database, Psycinfo
  • Page Numbers: pp.1206-1221
  • Keywords: Attention, Cognitive control, Context-specific proportion congruency, Spatial uncertainty
  • Middle East Technical University Affiliated: Yes

Abstract

The prime-probe version of the Stroop task has been predominantly used to demonstrate the context-specific proportion congruency (CSPC) effect. In this version, the location of the color is not known until its presentation, creating a spatial uncertainty for the color dimension. We propose that spatial uncertainty plays an important role in observing the CSPC effect. In this study, we investigated the role of spatial uncertainty with two experiments. In Experiment 1 (N = 53), we used a spatially separated version of the Stroop task having spatial uncertainty on the color dimension, and observed a significant CSPC effect. For Experiment 2, we conducted a preregistered prime-probe CSPC experiment with a considerably large sample (N = 128), eliminating the uncertainty of only the color dimension in one condition and both the color and the word dimensions in the other. Results showed that the CSPC effect was not observed in the first condition, while it was very small yet significant in the second condition. The Bayesian approach confirmed frequentist analyses of Experiment 1 and the first condition of Experiment 2. However, in the second condition of Experiment 2, there was no evidence regarding the existence of the CSPC effect. These findings support our claim that the spatial uncertainty of the color dimension, inherent in the prime-probe version Stroop task, contributed to the CSPC effect.