What can be learned in a context-specific proportion congruence paradigm? Implications for reproducibility

J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2020 Sep;46(9):1029-1050. doi: 10.1037/xhp0000801. Epub 2020 Jun 25.

Abstract

Crump and Milliken (2009) reported a context-specific proportion congruence (CSPC) effect for inducer and diagnostic sets, the strongest evidence to date of context-specific control. Attempts to replicate/reproduce this evidence have failed, including Experiment 1. Using a picture-word Stroop task, we tackled the question of how to interpret such failures by testing the consistency hypothesis (Hutcheon & Spieler, 2017) and two novel hypotheses inspired by our theorizing about learning opportunities in the CSPC paradigm. Experiment 2 found a CSPC effect when there was no diagnostic set, supporting the consistency hypothesis. Experiment 3 produced novel evidence for item-PC learning in a CSPC paradigm. In contrast, Experiment 4 did not produce strong evidence for location-item conjunctive learning. Our findings suggest failures to replicate/reproduce the CSPC effect do not necessarily indicate a Type I error or instability but instead may indicate episodic representations were organized based on item and not location. This item-PC learning hypothesis uniquely predicted Experiment 3 findings and accommodates findings of all but one prior attempt to replicate/reproduce the CSPC effect for inducer and diagnostic sets, including Experiment 1. Predicting whether future attempts are successful will require deeper understanding of the factors that promote learning of item-PC versus location-PC associations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

MeSH terms

  • Adolescent
  • Adult
  • Association*
  • Executive Function / physiology*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Neuropsychological Tests / standards*
  • Pattern Recognition, Visual / physiology*
  • Psychomotor Performance / physiology*
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Space Perception / physiology*
  • Stroop Test
  • Young Adult