Abstract
Converging evidence seems to suggest that affect and cognitive control are related in interesting ways, and some researchers have suggested that affect may play a causal, or at least otherwise interesting role in cognitive control. Here I discuss reasons to believe that these claims are either unfounded or based on a conceptual misunderstanding. They are unfounded with respect to the role of conscious affective experience, which is not supported by any unequivocal evidence. And they are based on a conceptual misunderstanding with respect to unconscious affect: Given the strong conceptual overlap between affect on the one hand and cognitive control on the other, finding mechanisms that are shared by affect and control is an almost necessary outcome that does not provide any mechanistic insight but merely reflects the semantic overlap between the concepts. However, this overlap may be taken to expand our research perspective and take affect-related and control-related outcomes as equivalent markers of one underlying function that encompasses, and thus goes beyond the traditional concept of affect and control.
Highlights
When the editors of this special issue on the connection between affect and cognitive control asked me for a contribution, I thought this would be an easy task
While my main interest leans towards the control side, research from our own and other colleagues' labs have generated many findings suggesting some kind of connection, such as the observation that mood manipulations have an impact on conflict monitoring and on the style of response generation in creativity tasks (Akbari Chermahini and Hommel, 2012)
What do we mean when asking questions such as what the role of affective processes in cognitive control is and whether cognitive control depends on affective processes? In the following, I will consider two meanings that these kinds of questions might have and will argue that neither of them makes much sense or is likely to elicit interesting answers
Summary
When the editors of this special issue on the connection between affect and cognitive control asked me for a contribution, I thought this would be an easy task. In an attempt to reconcile the original conflict-monitoring approaches of Botvinick et al (2001) with other approaches focusing more on decision-making, Botvinick (2007) suggested that conflict might be coded as an aversive, or negatively reinforcing event. This move to bring affect into play has triggered numerous investigations of how affective manipulations of various kinds impact cognitive control in tasks with a high degree of response uncertainty.
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