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Abstract
The neural mechanisms of cognitive conflicts within various flanker tasks are still unclear, which may be mixed with different effects of short-term associations and long-term associations. We applied a perceptual (color) flanker task and a symbolic (arrow) flanker task to 25 healthy young adults, while the event-related potentials (ERP) and behavioral performance were recorded. The former contains stimulus-stimulus conflict (SSC) of short-term memory (STM) associations, and the latter contains stimulus-response conflict (SRC) of long-term memory (LTM) associations. Both flanker tasks included congruent and incongruent conditions. The reaction time demonstrated the stimulus-response conflict effect in the arrow flanker task without the stimulus-stimulus conflict effect in the color flanker task. The ERP results showed SSC enhanced the frontocentral N2b without behavioral effects. SRC increased the frontocentral P2 but decreased the centroparietal P3b with prolonged reaction time. In the comparison between both tasks, the color flanker task elicited both the centroparietal N2b/N300 and the frontocentral N400, and the arrow flanker task increased the occipital N1. Our findings provide new evidence that different neural mechanisms underlie conflict effects based on different types of memory associations.
Highlights
Some behavioral studies and dimensional overlap (DO) theory have shown that the conflict effect in the stimulus-response compatibility paradigms is derived either from the conflict between relevant and irrelevant stimulus dimensions, or from the conflict between irrelevant stimulus dimensions and relevant response dimensions (De Jong et al, 1994; Kornblum, 1994; Kornblum et al, 1999; Treccani et al, 2009)
reaction times (RTs) was significantly lower, and accuracy was obviously higher in the arrow flanker task than the color flanker task [t(24) = 8.454, p < 0.01, d = 1.691; t(24) = 7.597, p < 0.01, d = 1.519]; there was no significance between the two types of the task in the incongruent trials
The purpose of this study was to separate the neural correlates of stimulus conflict (SSC) and stimulus-response conflict (SRC) and parse the neural mechanism of conflict effects based on short-term memory (STM) or long-term memory (LTM) in flanker tasks
Summary
Some behavioral studies and dimensional overlap (DO) theory have shown that the conflict effect in the stimulus-response compatibility paradigms is derived either from the conflict between relevant and irrelevant stimulus dimensions (stimulus-stimulus conflict, SSC), or from the conflict between irrelevant stimulus dimensions and relevant response dimensions (stimulus-response conflict, SRC) (De Jong et al, 1994; Kornblum, 1994; Kornblum et al, 1999; Treccani et al, 2009). Depending on the type of stimulus and experimental design, the flanker task may contain two Neural Mechanisms of Flanker Tasks types of conflicts (De Houwer, 2003) When perceptual materials such as letters and colors are used as stimulus materials for the flanker task, conflicts will occur between relevant and irrelevant stimulus dimensions and SSC generated; when symbolic materials such as arrows are used as stimulus materials for the flanker task, the conflict will occur between irrelevant stimulus dimensions and relevant response dimensions and SRC caused. We observed similar frontal P2 for SRC in addition to the frontal N2b enhancement for SSC using a perceptual flanker 2:1 mapping task (Zhou et al, 2019), in which two colors were associated with each response hand, respectively. Which ERP components induced by SSC and SRC in the flanker paradigm have not yet achieved consistent results
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