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Abstract The effects of bilingual language experience on cognitive control are still debated. A recent proposal is that being bilingual enhances attentional control. This is based on studies showing smaller effects of the nature of the preceding trial on the current trial in bilinguals (Grundy et al., 2017). However, performance on such tasks can also be accounted for by lower-level processes such as the binding and unbinding of stimulus and response features. The current study used a Partial Repetition Cost paradigm to explicitly test whether language experience can affect such processes. Results showed that bi- and monolinguals did not differ in their responses when the stimulus features were task-relevant. However, the bilinguals showed smaller partial repetition costs when the features were task-irrelevant. These findings suggest that language experience does not affect lower-level processes, and supports the view that bilinguals exhibit enhanced attentional disengagement.
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This content will become publicly available on June 1, 2026
Incentive Effects Capture Variability in Task-General Control Allocation.
To understand how people vary in their cognitive control engagement, researchers use different laboratory tasks and compare performance on trials that are more versus less control-demanding (e.g., congruency effects). However, previous research has struggled to uncover consistent patterns of correlation across cognitive control tasks, leading to questions about the utility of these tasks and the existence of task-general control. The current study sought to test whether these validity concerns may center on the stimulus-driven nature of congruency effects, rather than the tasks themselves. To overcome this obstacle, we varied task incentives while holding stimulus features constant. We show both theoretically and empirically that the effects of incentives on control allocation correlate across tasks. Together, findings support task-general control processes that operate across different contexts.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2502558
- PAR ID:
- 10628545
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- San Francisco, CA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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