Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Conflict adaptation is an important phenomenon, as the interference effect on the current trials is reduced following incongruent versus congruent trials. Moreover, conflict adaptation effect (CAE) is thought to measure adaptive control on a trial-by-trial basis. There are two main theories explaining the mechanisms underlying CAE: conflict monitoring theory and adaptation by binding theory. However, both theories have not explicitly proposed a clear relationship between conflict strength and cognitive control adjustment. Previous studies have mostly focused on the type of conflict that triggers CAE, which reflected qualitative analysis. Hence, it remains unclear whether changes in the level of conflict of the same conflict type affect conflict adaptation. To address the above issue, the present study recruited 31 healthy participants with a mean age of 19.74 years to perform the variant of the letter flanker task without feature repetitions. Each stimulus was composed of “F/H/N/P” letter components and arranged in a way that a central target letter was flanked by symmetric arrays of two distracter letters. Experiment manipulated the level of conflict by parametrically varying the target-distracter compatibility. Flankers were 100% compatible with the central target for no-conflict condition (e.g., NNNNN), 50% for low-conflict condition (e.g., HNNNH), and 0% for high-conflict condition (e.g., HHNHH). Congruent stimuli were presented on 50% of trials with each incongruent condition occurring equally often on the remaining 50% of trials. Results showed that reaction times (RTs) increased with the number of incompatible flankers, suggesting a correlation with the level of conflict. Moreover, the interaction between previous trial congruency (no-conflict/low-conflict/high-conflict) and current trial congruency (no-conflict/low-conflict/high-conflict) was significant, which suggested that congruency of previous trials affected the interference effect of current trials. Follow-up analyses revealed that there were classic conflict adaptation phenomena between no-conflict and low-conflict, no-conflict and high-conflict, and low-conflict and high-conflict conditions. These results showed that conflict adaptation was also triggered by the level of conflict in addition to the occurrence of the conflict. Overall, the present study demonstrated that the conflict strength of previous trials was related to the cognitive control level of current trials, showing that larger conflict led to stronger cognitive control adjustment. In addition, the function of conflict-induced cognitive control may be realized by attentional focusing. In conclusion, the present study emphasizes that changes in the level of conflict could trigger conflict adaptation, which provides more direct support for attention adjustment mechanism of conflict monitoring theory. Combining existing researches, we infer that conflict monitoring is sensitive to the type and level of conflict, and adjusts the level of cognitive control to facilitate conflict resolution.
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2020-09-08
Abstract： Conflict adaptation is an important phenomenon, as the interference effect on the current trial is reduced following incongruent versus congruent trial. Moreover, conflict adaptation effect (CAE) is thought to measure adaptive control on a trial-by-trial basis. There are two main theories to explain the mechanisms underlying CAE: conflict monitoring theory and adaptation by binding theory. However, both theories have not explicitly proposed a clear relationship between conflict strength and cognitive control adjustment. Previous studies have mostly focused on the type of conflict that triggers CAE, which reflected qualitative analysis. Hence, it remains unclear whether changes in the level of conflict of the same conflict type affect conflict adaptation. To address the above issue, the present study recruited 31 healthy participants with a mean age of 19.74 years to perform the variant of the letter flanker task without feature repetitions. Each stimulus was composed of “F/H/N/P” letter components and arranged such that a central target letter was flanked by symmetric arrays of two distracter letters. Experiment manipulated the level of conflict by parametrically varying the target-distracter compatibility. Flankers were 100% compatible with the central target for no-conflict condition (e.g., NNNNN), 50% for low-conflict condition (e.g., HNNNH), and 0% for high-conflict condition (e.g., HHNHH). Congruent stimuli were presented on 50% of trials with each incongruent condition occurring equally often on the remaining 50% of trials. Results showed that reaction times (RTs) increased with the number of incompatible flankers, suggesting a correlation with the level of conflict. Moreover, the interaction between previous trial congruency (no-conflict/low-conflict/high-conflict) and current trial congruency (no-conflict/low-conflict/high-conflict) was significant, which suggested that congruency of previous trial affected the interference effect of current trial. Follow-up analyses revealed that there were classic conflict adaptation phenomena between no-conflict and low-conflict, no-conflict and high-conflict, and low-conflict and high-conflict conditions. These results showed that conflict adaptation was also triggered by the level of conflict in addition to the occurrence of the conflict. Overall, the present study demonstrated that the conflict strength of previous trial was related to the cognitive control level of current trial, showing that larger conflict led to stronger cognitive control adjustment. In addition, the function of conflict-induced cognitive control may be realized by attention focusing. In conclusion, the present study emphasizes that changes in the level of conflict could trigger conflict adaptation that provides more direct supporting evidence for attention adjustment mechanism of conflict monitoring theory. Combining existing research, we infer that conflict monitoring was sensitive to the type and level of conflict and that it adjusted the level of cognitive control to facilitate conflict resolution.
Peer Review Status:
Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Experimental Psychology submitted time 2019-10-16
Abstract： Stressor presents a risk factor in everyday life by not only triggering stress responses in the body but also influencing cognitive processing. Previous research has shown that the medial frontal cortex and dorsolateral frontal cortex, on which error processing depends, are susceptible to acute stress. However, few studies have explored the effect of stress on error processing. It is still unclear whether individuals with acute stress can effectively detect their own error responses and how acute stress influences the transfer from error monitoring to post-error adjustment. To address these issues, we recruited 52 healthy male participants and randomly assigned them into stress (N = 26) or control (N = 26) groups. The participants were first asked to undergo an acute stress test or control-stress test and soon after that perform an error awareness task. Acute stress was induced by the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) which consists of a public speech task and a mental arithmetic task. The error awareness task was a motor go/no-go response inhibition task, in which the participants marked the responses where they recognized errors. Additionally, information on the participants’ heart rates, subjective emotional states, and perceived stress levels was collected to evaluate their immediate reaction to stress. Finally, we used salivary cortisol levels to explore the delayed reaction to stress during the experiment. The acute stress induction was indexed by the increases in free cortisol levels, heart rates, perceived stress levels, and negative affect in the stress group compared with the control group. Two main findings were obtained in this study. First, the accuracy of error awareness in the stress group was lower than that of the control group, and the negative affect under acute stress was negatively predictive of the accuracy of error awareness in the stress group but not the control group, suggesting that acute stress led to poor error monitoring. Second, the accuracy of the first trials after aware errors was significantly lower than that after unaware errors in the stress group, but there was no change in the control group, showing that post-error performance was impaired following acute stress. Altogether, the present study demonstrated that participants could not effectively identify error responses after acute stress, and their post-error adjustment was impaired even when the error responses were identified. Our results show that stress plays an important role in error processing, which is consistent with the biphasic-reciprocal model that proposes that stress responses enhance the activation of the amygdala but impair neural functioning in the prefrontal cortex. In conclusion, the present study demonstrates that acute stress impairs the performance monitoring system, which leads to impaired post-error adaptive behaviors. " " "
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