The Effectiveness of Cue Relevance and Saliency in the Context-Specific Proportion Congruent Effect

The context-specific proportion congruent (CSPC) effect can be observed when within a block of trials two different ratios congruent-to-incongruent trials are assigned to different variants of stimulus feature (like location or colour). This feature is a contextual cue. CSPC effect is present when congruency effect size is differentiated according to the ratio congruent-to-incongruent trials assigned to specific stimulation parts. In the present paper the relevance and saliency of contextual cues in variants of the flanker task were systematically manipulated, by varying background colour, stimulus colour and luminance, and target-arrow direction as contextual cues. The obtained results support the claim that task-relevancy of the contextual cue is a critical factor in predicting its effectiveness (no CSPC effect for task-irrelevant background, stimuli colour or luminance, and significant CSPC effect for task-relevant target-arrow direction).