Neural Oscillation Mechanisms of Conflict Adaptation

Abstract

The incongruence between the target and the distractor stimuli will trigger human behavioral conflicts. Specially, thesequential conflict contexts can induce an adaptation to the conflict in the human brain. However, the cognitive andneural mechanisms of conflict adaptation are not clear in the existing studies. To investigate the neural oscillationcourses of conflict adaptation, we adopted a conflict observation task and recorded the behavioral andelectroencephalographic (EEG) data from 15 healthy human subjects when they were performing the letter Flankertask. For the EEG data, time-frequency analysis showed the neural oscillation mechanisms of conflict adaptation. Inthe observation task, the alpha-band (9-3 Hz, 480-980 ms) event-related desynchronization (ERD) in the left- andcentro-frontal regions was observed in the incongruent condition; however, the alpha-band event-relatedsynchronization (ERS) in these regions was observed in the congruent condition. In the response task, the magnitudeof theta-band (6-8 Hz, 50-1000 ms) ERS in the left- and centro-frontal regions was significantly stronger in cIcondition than that in iI condition, which reflected conflict adaptation. The results indicate that the conflict caninduce the modulations of magnitudes within special frequency ranges, which makes the brain implement the controlof conflict more effectively.