Fig. 1: Illustration of the semantic and non-semantic tasks.

a Semantic association task: Participants made yes/no decisions about whether pairs of words were globally semantically associated or not. We parametrically manipulated the association strength between the probe and target word, typically judged to be related or unrelated on a 5-point rating scale. b Semantic feature matching task: Participants decided if probe and target concepts shared a specific visual semantic feature (color or shape), indicated at the top of the screen during each trial. The feature prompt, probe and target words appeared simultaneously. We parametrically manipulated the degree of feature similarity between the probe and target concepts that were typically judged to be matching or non-matching for the specified feature on a 5-point rating scale. c, d Non-semantic tasks for domain-general control: c involved a spatial working memory task where participants tracked sequentially presented locations. d entailed math decision tasks, requiring the maintenance and manipulation of single or double-digit numbers.