Emma S. Wiedenmann¹, Rebeka C. Almasi¹, Myeong-Ho Sohn¹; ¹The George Washington University

The conflict adaptation effect demonstrates flexible cognitive control, wherein the congruency effect is contextually reduced (Tae et al., 2022). Flexible deployment of cognitive effort is not limited to cognitive control tasks. Low perceptual fluency also requires effort. This flexibility has been observed in perceptual fluency through the Clarity Sequence Effect (CSE), where the difference between responses to clear and blurry stimuli is reduced after viewing a previously blurry stimulus (Dreisbach & Fischer, 2011). Contextual modulation has also been demonstrated for the Item-Specific Proportion Clarity Effect (ISPC). However, this contextual modulation has not yet been extensively and systematically explored with other cognitive control markers, such as the List-Wide Proportion Congruency Effect (LWPC). Furthermore, the explanation that these effects are likely subject to binding requires further investigation. The current study aimed to examine whether perceptual fluency exhibits similar contextual modulation to cognitive control. Participants performed a gender identification task using either clear or blurry stimuli. Experiment 1 sought to replicate the CSE by presenting an equal proportion of clear and blurry stimuli. Experiment 2 utilized a block design to investigate LWPC, with one block containing 80% blurry stimuli and 20% clear stimuli. Experiment 3 examined the ISPC using an intermixed design: Half the stimuli were mostly clear (80% clear, 20% blurry), while the other half were mostly blurry (80% blurry, 20% clear). Our findings revealed that the contextual modulation of perceptual fluency for the CSE and the LWPC was present only after a response repetition. In contrast, perceptual fluency was contextually modulated during the ISPC, occurring both after a response repetition and a different response. The other effects were attributed to binding. These results suggest that perceptual fluency and cognitive control share similar contextual modulation mechanisms when stimuli are modulated on an item-specific basis.