Domain-specific conflict adaptation without feature repetitions

• Published in: Psychonomic bulletin & review Vol. 18; no. 3; pp. 505 - 511
• Main Authors: Akçay, Çağlar, Hazeltine, Eliot
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer-Verlag 01-06-2011; Springer; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Adaptation, Psychological; Algorithms; Attention; Behavioral Science and Psychology; Biological and medical sciences; Cognition & reasoning; Cognition. Intelligence; Cognitive Psychology; Conflict (Psychology); Decision making. Choice; Executive Function; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Learning; Photic Stimulation; Psychology; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Reaction Time; Serial Learning; Studies; Cognitive and attentional control; Repetition effects; Attention and executive control; Decision making; Human; Executive function; Attention; Cognition; Experimental study; Conflict; Cognitive control; Repetition; Adaptation
• ISSN: 1069-9384; 1531-5320
• DOI: 10.3758/s13423-011-0084-y

An influential account of how cognitive control deals with conflicting sources of information holds that conflict is monitored by a module that automatically recruits attention to resolve the conflict. This leads to reduced effects of conflict on the subsequent trial, a phenomenon termed
conflict adaptation
. A prominent question is whether control processes are domain specific—that is, recruited only by the particular type of conflict they resolve. Previous studies that have examined this question used two-choice tasks in which feature repetition effects could be responsible for domain-specific adaptation effects. We report two experiments using four-choice (Experiment
1
) and five-choice (Experiment
2
) tasks that contain two types of irrelevant sources of potentially conflicting information: stimulus location (Simon conflict) and distractors (flanker conflict). In both experiments, we found within-type conflict adaptation for both types of conflict after eliminating trials on which stimulus features were repeated from one trial to the next. Across-type conflict adaptation, however, was not significant. Thus, conflict adaptation was due to domain-specific recruitment of cognitive control. Our results add converging evidence to the idea that multiple independent control processes are involved in reactive cognitive control, although whether control is always local remains to be determined.