Affective effects on congruence sequence effects (CSE): when feature-integration contribution is minimized versus maximized

The mechanism underlying congruence sequence effects (CSE) has been an issue since Mayr, Awh, and Laurey (2003) illustrated that the CSE observed in a simple two alternative force choice (2-AFC) flanker task was significant only when targets repeated. While some researchers or theories argue that CSEs are rooted in feature integration (Hommel, 2004), there is evidence showing that the CSE without feature integration is also accessible in some conditions (Kim & Cho, 2014; Schmidt & Weissman, 2014; Weissman, Jiang, & Egner, 2014). Among previous studies that investigated affective effects on CSEs, few controlled for the contribution of feature integration to CSEs. Given the observation that affect influences feature integration (for a review, see e.g., Mather & Sutherland, 2011), we attempt to test affective influences on CSEs with and without feature integration in the current experiment.