Are control processes domain-general? A replication of ‘To adapt or not to adapt? The question of domain-general cognitive control’ (Kan et al. 2013)

Abstract

Conflict and conflict adaptation are well-studied phenomena in experimental psychology. Standard tasks investigating causes and outcomes of conflict during information processing include the Stroop, the Flanker and the Simon task. Interestingly, recent research efforts have moved toward investigating whether conflict in one task domain influences information processing in another task domain, typically referred to as cross-task conflict adaptation. These transfer effects are of central importance for theories about our cognitive architecture, as they are interpreted as pointing towards domain-general cognitive mechanisms. Given the importance of these cross-task transfer effects, the current paper targets at replicating one of the key findings. Specifically, Kan et al. (Kan et al. 2013 Cognition 129, 637–651) showed that reading syntactically ambiguous sentences result in processing adjustments in subsequent Stroop trials. This result is in line with the idea that conflict monitoring works in a domain overarching manner. The present paper presents two replication studies: (i) exact replication: identical sentence-reading task intermixed with stimulus-based Stroop task and (ii) conceptual replication: identical sentence-reading task intermixed with response-based Stroop task. Power calculations were based on the original paper. Both experiments were pre-registered. Despite the experiments being closely designed according to the original study, there was no evidence supporting the hypothesis regarding cross-domain conflict adaptation.

Keywords

• control
• domain-general
• replications
• cognitive control
• language