In search of Perruchet’s dissociation between expectancy and control in the flanker task

Adaptation to cognitive conflict has been demonstrated in the form of reduced congruency effects following runs of high conflict (incongruent) trials, and increased effects following runs of low conflict (congruent) trials, known as the progressive congruency sequence effect (PCSE). This phenomenon has been attributed to an expectancy for conflict, yet direct evidence linking expectancy to performance is limited. Here we leveraged a dissociation paradigm known as the Perruchet effect to test the role of expectancy in producing conflict adaptation.

Using variations of the flanker task, we ran three experiments investigating how expectancy influences conflict adaptation. Experiment 1 assessed the effect of expectancy for conflict specifically on the PCSE by manipulating the feature relevant to the expectancy rating (conflict expectancy vs. response expectancy). Experiment 2 aimed to increase motivation to produce accurate expectancies by directly incentivising the rating task.

Experiment 3 addressed unexpected patterns in expectancy by examining participant’s ability to track conflict history. Across Experiments 1 and 2, participants did not show reliable conflict expectancy trends. Experiment 3 revealed that this may be because some participants exhibit poor explicit recall of conflict history.

Importantly, the PCSE remained robust across all experiments and conditions. This series of experiments suggests that the PCSE in the flanker task operates independently of conscious expectancy, challenging expectancy-based accounts of adaptive control. We would like to acknowledge Dr.

Daniel Pearson, who offered valuable contributions into the interpretation and design of the experiments. No funding was received for this research. School of Psychology, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia Ellen Christy, Hilary J.

Livesey The authors declare no competing interests. The procedures from all three experiments were carried out in accordance with the regulations as outlined under the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research. All protocols have been approved by the University of Sydney Human Ethics Committee (ethics protocol: 2023/HE000715).