Abstract
Stimulus-driven behaviors are triggered by the specific stimuli with which they are associated. For example, words elicit automatic reading behavior. When stimulus-driven behaviors are incongruent with one’s current goals, task conflict can emerge, requiring the activation of a task control mechanism. The Stroop task induces task conflict by asking participants to focus on color naming and ignore the automatic, stimulus-driven, irrelevant word reading task. Thus, task conflict manifests in Stroop incongruent as well as in congruent trials. Previous studies demonstrated that when task control fails, reaction times in congruent trials slow down, leading to a reversed facilitation effect. In the present mini-review, we review the literature on the manifestation of task conflict and the recruitment of task control in the Stroop task and present the physiological and behavioral signatures of task control and task conflict. We then suggest that the notion of task conflict is strongly related to the concept of stimulus-driven behaviors and present examples for the manifestation of stimulus-driven task conflict in the Stroop task and additional tasks, including object-interference and affordances tasks. The reviewed literature supports the illustration of task conflict as a specific type of conflict, which is different from other conflict types and may manifest in different tasks and under diverse modalities of response.
Highlights
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Cognition, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
We first review the literature of Stroop task conflict, illustrate task conflict’s physiological and behavioral signature and move to describe task conflict in the context of stimulus-driven behaviors, refer to its manifestation in other tasks and under diverse modalities of response, and suggest that impaired task control may be related to certain pathological behaviors
Goldfarb and Henik (2007) suggested that the Stroop task consists of two separate conflicts – an information conflict between the incongruent word and ink color, which manifests in incongruent trials because of the incongruency between taskrelevant and task-irrelevant information; and a task conflict between the relevant color-naming task and the irrelevant, stimulus-driven word-reading task, which manifests in incongruent as well as in congruent trials because words trigger an automatic tendency to read
Summary
Individuals must decide between two alternative task demands. Such circumstances often result in the emergence of task conflict. Dissociation between the two conflicts was demonstrated by their diverse patterns of brain activation (Aarts et al, 2009; Desmet et al, 2011; Elchlepp et al, 2013) and their reflection in different components of an ex-Gaussian distribution (Steinhauser and Hübner, 2009; see Aarts et al, 2009; Moutsopoulou and Waszak, 2012; Shahar and Meiran, 2015) These findings support the existence of task conflict as a specific type of conflict that is dissociated from other conflict types
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