Proportion of conflict, contingency learning, and recency effects in a Stroop task.

Recent research on the relation between learning and cognitive control has assumed that conflict modulates learning, either by increasing arousal and hence improving learning in high-conflict situations, or by inducing control, and hence inhibiting the processing of distracters and their eventual association with the imperative responses. We analyse whether the amount of conflict, manipulated through the proportion of congruency in a set of Stroop inducer trials, affects learning of contingencies established on diagnostic trials composed by neutral words associated with colour responses. The results reproduced the list-wide proportion of congruency effect on the inducer trials, and showed evidence of contingency learning on the diagnostic trials, but provided no indication that this learning was modulated by the level of conflict. Specific analyses conducted to control for the impact of episodic effects on the expression of learning indicated that contingency effects were not driven by the incremental processes that could be expected by associative learning, but rather they were due to the impact of the most recent trial involving the same distracter. Accordingly, these effects disappeared when tested selectively on trials that required a non-matching response with respect to the previous occurrence of the distracter. We interpret this result in the context of the debate on how learning and memory interact with the processes of cognitive control.

Emulation and mimicry in school students with typical development and with high functioning autism.

Two samples of participants with typical development (TD) and high functioning autism performed an imitation task where the goal was of high or low salience, and where the modeled action complied with or was contrary to the end-state comfort (ESC) effect. Imitation was affected by the ESC effect in both groups, and participants with autism reproduced high salient goals as frequently as did participants with TD, but they reproduced less of the low salient goals. Participants with autism showed a reduced tendency to reproduce those actions which were relatively inefficient to reach the goals. The results are discussed in terms of either a relative imbalance between emulation and mimicry in autism, or a reduced tendency to overimitate.

Automatic imitation and spatial compatibility in a key-pressing task.

Automatic imitation has been often confounded with spatial compatibility effects. Heyes (2011) called attention to this confound, and proposed some criteria which must be satisfied before these effects could be unequivocally taken to be an index of the functioning of the human mirror system. Evidence satisfying such criteria has been reported by Catmur and Heyes (2011), using a relatively unfamiliar finger abduction movement. However, because many previous studies relied on more familiar actions, we aimed at testing whether analogous effects could be obtained with a more practiced key-pressing task. In Experiment 1, we used anatomical controls (i.e., views of right vs. left hands) under conditions affording mirror imitation, and showed that spatial compatibility masked the effects of automatic imitation. Experiment 2 used rotated conditions to control for this spatial-anatomical confound, and it showed unequivocal effects of automatic imitation, which were obtained regardless of its relation to the spatial stimulus-response mapping. These results cast some doubts on the interpretation of previous reports relying exclusively on scenes presented from a mirror perspective, and suggest the convenience of using both rotated scenes and anatomical controls in order to assess automatic imitation.