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Boundary Conditions for the Influence of Spatial Proximity on Context-Specific Attentional Settings
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Description: Flexibility of cognitive control is illustrated by the context-specific proportion compatibility (CSPC) effect, the now well-documented pattern showing that compatibility effects are reduced in mostly incompatible relative to mostly compatible locations. The episodic retrieval account attributes the CSPC effect to location-specific representations that include the attentional settings formed via experience within a given location (e.g., a “focused” attentional setting becomes bound to a location with frequent conflict whereas a “relaxed” setting becomes bound to one with infrequent conflict). However, Diede and Bugg (2016) demonstrated that the attentional setting associated with a given location can be based on experiences that accumulate across multiple “grouped” locations, namely those that are proximal to the location relative to other (distal) locations. This spatial grouping effect supported the relative proximity hypothesis, a hypothesis that was further tested in the present study. Experiment 1 replicated the spatial grouping effect and showed that it could be disrupted by a horizontal line dividing the otherwise grouped locations. Experiments 2 through 4 suggested grouping may be a form of “chunking”— the spatial grouping effect did not occur when the number of proximal locations was few enough to represent independently (2) but did occur when there were 6 locations. When there were 8 proximal locations (10 overall), the CSPC effect disappeared entirely. The findings suggest important boundary conditions for the relative proximity hypothesis and inform our understanding of how past experiences with conflict are organized in the form of episodic representations that enable on-the-fly adjustments in cognitive control.