Within- and cross-task cued congruency effects: evidence that control adaptation strategies can transfer between stimuli and tasks

Research suggests that people can adjust cognitive control in anticipation of conflict on the basis of arbitrary cues signalling situations where responses linked to goal-relevant and goal-irrelevant stimulus dimensions conflict (i.e., congruency cues). However, findings are mixed and several questions remain. First, can control adaptation be implemented solely based on the expectation of conflict (or its absence)? Second, what is the nature of such proactive control adaptation? Specifically, does it involve the implementation of apposite adjustments of control processes tailored to the expected level of conflict, or does it instead reflect task-specific strategies, such as an attentional shift to the task-irrelevant dimension, or even just the general recruitment of additional attentional resources? Finally, can this control preparation transfer and affect performance in other conflict tasks? Across three experiments, we used a cued-congruency task-switching paradigm and found that people can benefit from congruency cues (Experiment 1, n=40), and that this proactive control generalizes from a flanker task to a similar flanker task involving different stimuli (Experiment 2, n=51) and even to a completely different (i.e., Simon) conflict task (Experiment 3, n=50). Overall, our findings are consistent with a domain-general view of proactive cognitive control.