Assessing the Durability of One-Shot Stimulus-Control Bindings

It has been proposed that cognitive control processes may be implemented in a contextually appropriate manner through the encoding, and cued retrieval, of associations between stimuli and the control processes that were active during their encoding, forming “stimulus-control bindings” as part of episodic event files. Prior work has found strong evidence for such a mechanism by observing behavioral effects of stimulus-control bindings based on a single pairing (one-shot learning). Here, we addressed the important question of how durable these one-shot stimulus-control bindings are. Over three experiments, we investigated the durability of one-shot stimulus-control bindings in relation to both the passage of time and the number of intervening events between the encoding (prime) and retrieval (probe) of the stimulus-control bindings. We found that stimulus-control bindings are quite robust to temporal decay, lasting at least up to 5 minutes in the absence of similar intervening events. By contrast, binding effects were more short-lived in the face of interference from the encoding of similar events between the prime and probe, with a maximum duration of ~2 minutes. Together, these results shed new light on the characteristics of the binding mechanisms underlying the integration of internal control processes in episodic event files and highlight that interference, rather than temporal decay, may be the main limiting factor on long-term effects of item-specific one-shot control learning.