Sequential effects in cognitive psychology: Same but different?

• Applicant: Dr. Anne Voormann
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 557577950

Learning and training effects describe an improvement of performance by the repetition of perceptual, motor, or cognitive processes. Sequential effects represent the smallest building blocks of learning and training effect, focusing on behavioural changes depending on the task characteristics in two consecutive trials. Typically, a repetition between task requirements from trial n-1 to trial n goes along with increased performance (shorter response times and higher accuracies), while an alternation goes along with decreased performance. Sequential effects occur across many different paradigms within cognitive psychology - in the present project I will focus on the visual search paradigm, the two-choice reaction time paradigm, the interference paradigm, and the task-switching paradigm. However, most previous accounts have been developed in the framework of paradigm-specific accounts. Nevertheless, these accounts share some conceptual assumption regarding the origin of sequential effects. They discuss across paradigms, for example, bottom-up priming vs. top-down reconfigurations, episodic memory traces, and conflict as origin for sequential effects. Additionally, there exists a theoretical scaffold that combines sequential effects of numerous paradigms, the framework binding and retrieval in action control (Frings et al., 2020). However, so far it is unclear whether sequential effects across paradigms share more than surface similarities or whether sequential effects from different paradigms are substantially different and, therefore, need to be addressed in paradigm-specific accounts. The present project aims to investigate this question. Therefore, I introduce six different manipulations that address the common conceptual assumptions behind sequential effects in three different work packages: 1) comparing the timeframe of bottom-up priming and comparing top-down adaptations based on explicit cues, 2) manipulating base rates and repetition rates to examine the role of episodic memory traces, and 3) inspecting higher-order sequential effects, considering more than just the previous trial (e.g., trial n-2), that are associated with certain types of conflict. These work packages are supplemented by a work package that uses cognitive modelling to investigate commonalities and differences in response time distributions and compare cognitive processes across paradigms. In all proposed projects I will investigate “paradigm” as within-subject factor to ascertain a powerful comparison. Thus, I expect that the knowledge derived from the successful completion of the project will help to distinguish between cognitive mechanisms behind sequential effects that are shared across (some) paradigms and such that differ.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: New Zealand
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Jeff Miller, Ph.D.