Voluntary and Involuntary Control of Automatic Processing in Spatial Congruency Tasks

This special issue focuses on spatial congruency effects. The dominant view that has emerged after 50 years of research on this topic is that an automatic route processes task-irrelevant spatial information while another, controlled route, supports rule-based response activation. However, in line with recent literature, this issue reports studies that show that what has been considered automatic, is subject to various control processes. Consequently, in order to account successfully for congruency effects, dual-route models should be adapted so that they can account for between and within trial modulation of congruency effects. On the other hand, these studies also show that the relationships between stimulus and response representations that give rise to congruency effects are far more complex than considered so far. Therefore, integrative models for (spatial) congruency effects must indicate when (and how) a response will be activated on the basis of irrelevant stimulus information. The present set of papers not only addresses these issues and outlines possible starting points for future research, but also extends beyond spatial congruency to domains such as task-switching, conflict monitoring, priming, attention, dual-tasking and number processing. Most importantly, this special issue explicitly demonstrates the significance of congruency effects for the study of cognitive control in general.