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Conflict control in task conflict and response conflict

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Abstract

Studies have suggested that conflict control can modulate conflict effects in response to differing levels of conflict context. The current study probed, in two experiments of proportion congruence, the relevance of both task conflict (between a currently relevant task and irrelevant task alternatives) and response conflict (between a currently relevant response and irrelevant response alternatives) to conflict control. In Experiment 1, proportion congruence between blocks was manipulated and in Experiment 2, proportion congruence was manipulated between items. The response conflict effect was smaller when proportion of incongruence was high, regardless if task conflict or response conflict proportions were manipulated. These findings suggest that both task conflict and response conflict are monitored but that only response conflict is being influenced by this monitoring process. Theoretical implications are discussed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 84105, Beer-Sheva, Israel

    Ami Braverman & Nachshon Meiran

Authors
  1. Ami Braverman
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  2. Nachshon Meiran
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Correspondence to Ami Braverman.

Appendix

Appendix

The purpose of the Appendix is to describe the proofs of why response repetition could not explain the conflict adaptation results found in Experiment 2. Without loss of generality, let us consider just the item proportion manipulation (Experiment 2) and the UP–DOWN task in a particular configuration of the experiment.

Response congruence manipulation

When the UP target stimulus is mostly response congruent, ↑ appears in 35 % of the trials and ↓ appears in 15 % when the correct response is UP. In this case, the DOWN target stimulus will be mostly response incongruent, so that ↑ appears in 35 % and ↓ appears in 15 % when the correct response is DOWN. Note that, for the UP–DOWN task, the proportions are the same for both UP and DOWN target stimuli and ↓ is more frequent than ↑. Consequently, the arrows are completely uninformative with respect to the correct response. The arrows do prime a specific response (↑ is more frequent than ↓, but regardless of proportion congruency). Moreover, since participants were assigned to different task configurations in a random order, there was no systematic higher proportion of a given arrow across participants.

Task conflict manipulation

When the UP target stimulus is mostly task congruent, ↕ appears in 35 % of the trials and ↔ appears in 15 % when the correct response is UP. In this case, the DOWN target stimulus is mostly task incongruent, so that ↔ appears in 35 % and ↕ appears in 15 % when the correct response is DOWN. Note that, for the UP–DOWN task ↕ appears more often when the correct response is UP and ↔ appears more often when the correct response is DOWN. Therefore, the interfering arrows do predict the correct response in this case. Note that when the proportion of task conflict was manipulated for UP and DOWN, the proportion of response conflict was 25:25 for these targets. The single-headed arrows serving to produce RCE were uninformative. Hence, RCE should have been unaffected, but it was affected. Moreover, in this case TCE should have been affected, but it was not. Note that, in this case, the proportion manipulation should have influenced TCE, but it did not.

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Braverman, A., Meiran, N. Conflict control in task conflict and response conflict. Psychological Research 79, 238–248 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-014-0565-5

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