Abstract
A frequently-studied phenomenon in cognitive-control research is conflict adaptation, or the finding that congruency effects are smaller after incongruent trials. Prominent cognitive control accounts suggest that this adaptation effect can be explained by transient conflict-induced modulations of selective attention, reducing congruency effects on the next trial. In the present study, we investigated these possible attentional modulations in four experiments using the Stroop and Flanker tasks, dissociating possible enhancements of task-relevant information from suppression of task-irrelevant information by varying when this information was presented. In two experiments, the irrelevant stimulus information was randomly presented shortly before, at the same time, or briefly after the presentation of the relevant dimension. In the other two, irrelevant information was always presented first, making this aspect fully predictable. Despite the central role that attentional adjustments play in theoretical accounts of conflict adaption, we only found evidence for such processes in one of the four experiments. Specifically, we found a modulation of the attention-related posterior N1 event-related potential component that was consistent with paying less attention to the irrelevant information after incongruent trials. This was accompanied by increased inter-trial mid-frontal theta power and a theta-power conflict adaptation effect. We interpret these results as evidence for an adaptive mechanism based on relative attentional inhibition. Importantly, this mechanism only clearly seems to be implemented in a very specific context of high temporal predictability, and only in the Flanker task.
Highlights
Cognitive control involves the ability to detect conflicting cues in the environment and to adjust our information processing system in order to optimize behavioral responses
Trials in which irrelevant distracter information preceded the relevant target resulted in the fastest response, followed by simultaneous and relevant-first trials and participants responded in general faster to congruent trials than to incongruent trials
Because we were mostly interested in the conflict adaptation effect split out per stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs) condition, we looked at the interaction between previous and current congruency per condition
Summary
Cognitive control involves the ability to detect conflicting cues in the environment and to adjust our information processing system in order to optimize behavioral responses. More importantly for the present work, the comparison of the EEG data for the -200 ms condition between these blocks yielded evidence for an attentional modulation that preceded the presentation of the relevant stimulus dimension, yielding a smaller negativity in the constant-SOA blocks starting approximately 150 ms after the onset of this stimulus dimension This modulation, due to timing and spatial distribution, was related to a selection negativity [SN; 21] and was interpreted as indexing the degree to which attention was deployed to the word component. We planned to explore the context of possible attentional modulations by looking at oscillatory activity before and after the second trial in a conflict adaption sequence, in order to relate to earlier work showing oscillatory power modulations between the two trials [15, 26,27,28] and conflict-related frontal modulations in consecutive trials [29,30,31,32]
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