Contingency Learning across control and non-control condition.

Does frequency-based contingency learning (CL) interacts with task demand?

Non-conflict condition: presented a set of face images with varied frequencies (i.e., some individual faces are shown more often than others) and let subjects categorize the gender.

In accordance with CL, we expect faster RTs for more frequently shown stimuli.

Condition with conflict: added gender text labels (“male” or “female”) on top of the images, thus turning a basic perceptual decision making task into a Stroop-like task.

Two hypotheses: greater task demand (in the Stroop version) could either (1) facilitate CL through globally increased attention; or (2) interfere with CL because attention has been recruited to resolve conflict and away from CL. I am currently in the process of analyzing the data from this study.