# No congruency sequence effect across Simon and Eriksen tasks with aligned temporal processing dynamics: Evidence for domain-specific over domain-general cognitive control

## TL;DR

This study shows that cognitive control remains specific to the type of conflict, even when the timing of processing is aligned across tasks.

## Contribution

The study aligns temporal dynamics across Simon and Eriksen tasks to test domain-specificity of cognitive control.

## Key findings

- Little to no transfer of the congruency sequence effect was observed across tasks.
- Temporal overlap of distractor-to-target processing was aligned in both tasks.
- Cognitive control remains specific to conflict types despite aligned temporal dynamics.

## Abstract

Previous studies have shown that the congruency sequence effect (CSE) is usually domain-specific, that is, no transfer across different conflict tasks is observed. The goal of the present study was to test whether the lack of a CSE transfer across the Simon and Eriksen flanker tasks can be explained by a confound of conflict type and the temporal dynamics of conflict processing (i.e., the temporal overlap of target and distractor processing). By presenting the target in the Eriksen task before the distractors, we were able to largely align the temporal overlap of distractor-to-target processing (as indexed by delta plots) in the Simon and Eriksen tasks. Nevertheless, across four experiments we found little, if any, evidence for a transfer of the CSE across tasks. Overall, the results demonstrate that cognitive control is highly specific to the type of conflict, even when controlling for the temporal dynamics of conflict processing.