Congruency effects are typically smaller after incongruent than after congruent trials. One explanation is in terms of higher levels of cognitive control after detection of conflict (conflict adaptation; e.g., M. M. Botvinick, T. S. Braver, D. M. Barch, C. S. Carter, & J. D. Cohen, 2001). An alternative explanation for these results is based on feature repetition and/or integration effects (e.g., B. Hommel, R. W. Proctor, & K.-P. Vu, 2004; U. Mayr, E. Awh, & P. Laurey, 2003). Previous attempts to dissociate feature integration from conflict adaptation focused on a particular subset of the data in which feature transitions were held constant (J. G. Kerns et al., 2004) or in which congruency transitions were held constant (C. Akcay & E. Hazeltine, in press), but this has a number of disadvantages. In this article, the authors present a multiple regression solution for this problem and discuss its possibilities and pitfalls.
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