Control by Association: Transfer of Implicitly Primed Attentional States across Linked Stimuli

This behavioral study is the first to probe whether learned control states (e.g., high attentional focus) can be transferred across closely linked cues. Although cognitive control has traditionally been viewed in opposition to associative learning, recent studies have shown that people can learn to associate particular stimuli with specific attentional control states. In experiments one and three, we examined whether these learned stimulus-control associations could transfer across related stimuli. First, specific face and house stimuli repeatedly preceded the presentation of particular scene stimuli to create paired face/house-scene associates. Next, scenes acted as implicit probabilistic cues that mostly preceded either congruent or incongruent Stroop trials and were thus associated with either low or high control-demand. Finally, the face and house stimuli preceded Stroop stimuli but were not predictive of congruency, testing whether stimulus-control associations would transfer from scenes to their associated face/house stimuli. We found evidence of a transfer effect in experiments one and three, and in experiment two, showed that transfer of control state associations depended on the initial associations linking the stimuli pairs. Generalizing attentional states across linked stimuli or contexts saves effort and makes dealing with volatile environmental demands easier. This form of transfer learning has previously been demonstrated for simple actions (stimulus-response associations) and for reward associations, but to the best of our knowledge, the present study provides the first ever evidence for the associative transfer of stimulus-control associations across related stimuli. This learning mechanism may form the basis of the human ability to generalize cognitive strategies over similar contexts.