Evidence against conflict monitoring and adaptation: An updated review

Abstract

One of the most influential ideas in recent decades in the cognitive psychology literature is conflict monitoring theory. According to this account, each time we experience a conflict (e.g., between a colour word and print colour in the Stroop task), attentional control is upregulated to minimize distraction on subsequent trials. Though influential, evidence purported to support this theoretical model (primarily, proportion congruent and congruency sequence effects) has been frequently criticized. Furious debate has centered on whether or not conflict monitoring does or does not occur and, if so, under which conditions. The present article presents an updated review of this debate. In particular, the article considers new research that either (a) seems particularly damaging for the conflict monitoring view or (b) seems to provide support for the theory. The author argues that new findings of the latter sort are still not compelling, several of which have already-demonstrated confounds and others which are plausibly confounded. Further progress has, to a greater extent than not, provided even stronger support for the position that conflict monitoring is merely an illusion. Instead, the net results can be more coherently understood in terms of (relatively) simpler learning/memory biases unrelated to conflict or attention that confound the key paradigms.

Multiple expectancies underlie the congruency sequence effect in confound-minimized tasks

“…It therefore appears that these accounts would require additional modification to accommodate the results of the current study. Thus, the results of the current study contribute to a growing body of findings from confound-minimized prime-probe tasks that call into question the conflict-monitoring account of the CSE (e.g., Weissman, Colter, Grant, & Bissett, 2017;Weissman, Egner, Hawks, & Link, 2015; for a discussion, see Schmidt, 2018).…”

“…The CSE has been attributed to a wide range of factors, including repetition expectancy, conflict monitoring, feature integration, and contingency learning (for reviews, see Duthoo, Abrahamse, Braem, Boehler, & Notebaert, 2014;Egner, 2007Egner, , 2017Schmidt, 2018;Schmidt & De Houwer, 2011).…”

Does incidental sequence learning allow us to better manage upcoming conflicting events?

“…For instance, the congruency effect is typically smaller right after having responded to a conflict trial (i.e., the congruency sequence effect or CSE; Gratton, Coles, & Donchin, 1992); or after having experienced a disproportionally large amount of conflict trials for a given block (i.e., List Wide Proportion Congruency effect or LWPCE; Logan & Zbrodoff, 1979), a specific context (Context Specific Proportion Congruency effect or CSPCE; Crump, Gong, & Milliken, 2006), or a specific item (Item Specific Proportion Congruency effect or ISPCE; Jacoby, Lindsay, & Hessels, 2003). In all cases, the idea is that conflict detection (occurring mainly on incongruent trials) results in a more appropriate balance of attentional focus between relevant and irrelevant information such that potential upcoming conflicts can be better managed (but see Schmidt, 2018).…”

Shared neural representations of cognitive conflict and negative affect in the medial frontal cortex

“…Each block hosted 32 trials (16 congruent/positive and 16 incongruent/negative) which were presented in a pseudo-random fashion with the following restriction: neither relevant nor irrelevant features of the target stimulus could be repeated. This restriction was used to investigate confound-free congruency sequence effects (see Braem et al, 2019;Schmidt, 2019; but this was not the aim of the current study and will not be discussed further). In total, each participant made trials (i.e., five runs of four blocks of trials).…”