Automaticity of cognitive control: Goal priming in response-inhibition paradigms.

Verbruggen, Frederick; Logan, Gordon D. · 2009 · Crossref

DOI: 10.1037/a0016645

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Summary

This study investigates whether response inhibition, a core component of cognitive control, can be triggered automatically by task-irrelevant environmental information. While cognitive control is traditionally viewed as an intentional, top-down process, prior research suggests that task goals can also be activated unintentionally via bottom-up, stimulus-driven mechanisms. Verbruggen and Logan (2009) tested this hypothesis using stop-signal and go/no-go paradigms to determine if semantic primes associated with "going" or "stopping" could automatically prime the corresponding task goals, thereby influencing performance. The authors conducted three experiments using stop-signal tasks where participants responded to visual stimuli (shapes) but withheld responses upon hearing an auditory stop signal. In Experiment 1, task-irrelevant primes ('GO', 'STOP', or '###') were embedded within the go stimuli. Results showed that go reaction times were significantly slower when the 'STOP' prime was presented compared to the neutral '###' prime, indicating a priming cost. However, no significant effect was found on stop-signal reaction times (SSRT). Experiment 2 examined whether this priming depended on task context by comparing stop-signal, go-only, and go/no-go conditions. The 'STOP' prime impaired go performance only in conditions where the stop goal was relevant to the task context (stop-signal and go/no-go), but not in the go-only condition. This demonstrated that goal priming is contextually dependent. Experiment 3 presented the primes ('GO', 'STOP', '###') as the stop signals themselves. Here, SSRT was significantly longer for the 'GO' prime than for 'STOP' or '###', showing that the stop process was impaired by incongruent goal priming. Control tasks ruled out perceptual differences in signal length as the cause. The findings indicate that both go and stop goals can be primed automatically by irrelevant semantic information, though the effects manifest primarily as performance costs rather than benefits. The authors explain these asymmetries using a stochastic accumulator model, where incongruent primes decrease the accumulation rate of evidence for the intended goal, slowing response time, while congruent primes provide insufficient boost to significantly speed up already fast responses. Crucially, the study shows that while automatic processes influence the speed of cognitive control, intentional goals ultimately determine whether a response is executed or inhibited. These results challenge the view that automaticity and cognitive control are mutually exclusive. Instead, they suggest that executive functions like response inhibition can be triggered by both top-down intentions and bottom-up stimulus associations. This implies that cognitive control is not purely voluntary but is susceptible to environmental cues, particularly when those cues are relevant to the current task context. The study contributes to the understanding of how learned associations and semantic information shape flexible, goal-directed behavior.

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• executive function