Feeling the conflict: The crucial role of conflict-awareness in adaptation

Desender, Kobe; Opstal, Filip Van; Bussche, Eva Van den

doi:10.1037/e636952013-267

Cited by 32 publications

(60 citation statements)

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“…Alternatively-and this is the explanation we favor-it is the aversive signal, and not the conflict proper, that initially motivates sequential conflict adjustments. In fact, the results from one recent study (Desender et al, 2014) might be interpreted in support of this assumption. There, sequential conflict adaptation was found only after Fig.…”

Section: What Is the Function Of The Aversive Conflict Signal?mentioning

confidence: 81%

“…The question we ask is, why should the concurrent activation of competing responses motivate the investment of cognitive resources when it is not even clear what the next trial will bring? Even though such a conflict-control loop seems adaptive, we assume that conflict occurrence alone cannot be the sole trigger for conflict adaptation because conflict (measureable response interference) does not always result in conflict adaptation (Desender, Van Opstal, & Van den Bussche, 2014). We therefore suggest an alternative framework that emphasizes the aversive nature of conflicts as the driving force (cf.…”

Section: What Is It That Motivates Conflict Adaptation?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Conflicts as Aversive Signals for Control Adaptation

Dreisbach

Fischer

2015

Curr Dir Psychol Sci

170

123

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The dynamic adaptation of cognitive control in the face of competition from conflicting response tendencies is one of the hallmarks of flexible human action control. Here, we suggest an alternative framework that places conflicttriggered control adaptation into the broader context of affect regulation. Specifically, we review evidence showing that (a) conflicts are inherently aversive, that (b) aversive stimuli in the absence of conflict also trigger behavioral adjustments, and, finally, that (c) conflict stimuli do trigger processes of affective counter-regulation. Together with recent findings showing that conflict-triggered control adaptation depends on the subjective experience of the conflict, we suggest that it is the subjective aversive conflict experience that originally motivates control adaptations. Such a view offers new perspectives for investigating and understanding intra-and interindividual differences in the regulation of cognitive control by differentiating between the individual sensitivity to experience and the individual ability to utilize the aversive signal.

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Section: What Is the Function Of The Aversive Conflict Signal?mentioning

confidence: 81%

Section: What Is It That Motivates Conflict Adaptation?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Conflicts as Aversive Signals for Control Adaptation

Dreisbach

Fischer

2015

Curr Dir Psychol Sci

170

123

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…In our study, confidence ratings were omitted with that task because the cognitive control tasks required fast responses that could have been interfered with by the intervening confidence report. However, one recent study (Desender, Van Opstal, & Van den Bussche, 2014) inserted a subjective rating (i.e., experienced conflict) in a go/no-go trial, which was shown to modulate conflict adaptation. Thus, future studies may strengthen the present findings by directly measuring confidence while performing cognitive control tasks.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does perceptual confidence facilitate cognitive control?

Koizumi

Maniscalco

Lau

2015

Atten Percept Psychophys

108

187

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Our visual perception is typically accompanied by a sense of subjective confidence. Since perceptual confidence is related to prefrontal activity, higher perceptual confidence may enhance cognitive control functions. To examine this interaction, we developed a novel method to selectively manipulate perceptual confidence while keeping stimulus discrimination accuracy constant. In a behavioral experiment, grating stimuli with different orientations were presented as go/no-go signals. Surprisingly, the results showed that confidence in visual discrimination of the signals on its own did not facilitate response inhibition, since when participants were presented with stimuli that yielded higher confidence, they were no better at performing a go/no-go task. These results were replicated with different (dot motion) stimuli, ruling out alternative explanations based on stimulus idiosyncrasy. In a different experiment, when the grating stimuli were presented as cues for task set preparation, we found that higher perceptual confidence also did not enhance task set preparation efficiency. This result was again replicated with dot motion stimuli. Since confidence may relate to perceptual awareness (Peirce & Jastrow, 1885), our findings may put current dominant theories in question, since these theories often suppose the critical involvement of consciousness in cognitive control. As a proof of concept, our method may also provide a new and powerful way to examine other functions of consciousness in future studies.

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“…More specifically, they argued that conflict is greater in trials with relatively long RTs than in trials with relatively short RTs, even within the congruent condition. Although it may initially seem surprising to talk about response conflict in congruent trials (Grinband et al, 2011), it could arise in various ways (Abrahamse & Braem, 2015;Desender, Van Opstal, & Van den Bussche, 2014; e.g., participants might prepare the wrong response prior to stimulus onset, which conflicts with the correct response that must ultimately be executed). Yeung and colleagues further suggested that RT is a rough estimate of experienced response conflict.…”

Section: Conflict Adaptationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Congruency sequence effects and previous response times: conflict adaptation or temporal learning?

Schmidt

Weissman

2015

Psychological Research

106

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In the present study, we followed up on a recent report of two experiments in which the congruency sequence effect -the reduction of the congruency effect after incongruent relative to congruent trials in Stroop-like tasks -was observed without feature repetition or contingency learning confounds. Specifically, we further scrutinized these data to determine the plausibility of a temporal learning account as an alternative to the popular conflict adaptation account. To this end, we employed a linear mixed effects model to investigate the role of previous response time in producing the congruency sequence effect, because previous response time is thought to influence temporal learning. Interestingly, slower previous response times were associated with a reduced current-trial congruency effect, but only when the previous trial was congruent. An adapted version of the Parallel Episodic Processing (PEP) model was able to fit these data if it was additionally assumed that attention "wanders" during different parts of the experiment (e.g., due to fatigue or other factors). Consistent with this assumption, the magnitude of the congruency effect was correlated across small blocks of trials. These findings demonstrate that a temporal learning mechanism provides a plausible account of the congruency sequence effect.

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Feeling the conflict: The crucial role of conflict-awareness in adaptation

Cited by 32 publications

References 0 publications

Conflicts as Aversive Signals for Control Adaptation

Conflicts as Aversive Signals for Control Adaptation

Does perceptual confidence facilitate cognitive control?

Congruency sequence effects and previous response times: conflict adaptation or temporal learning?

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