Conflict Adaptation and Cue Competition during Learning in an Eriksen Flanker Task

Abstract

Two experiments investigated competition between cues that predicted the correct target response to a target stimulus in a response conflict procedure using a flanker task. Subjects received trials with five-character arrays with a central target character and distractor flanker characters that matched (compatible) or did not match (incompatible) the central target. Subjects’ expectancies for compatible and incompatible trials were manipulated by presenting pre-trial cues that signaled the occurrence of compatible or incompatible trials. On some trials, a single cue predicted the target stimulus and the required target response. On other trials, a second redundant, predictive cue was also present on such trials. The results showed an effect of competition between cues for control over strategic responding to the target stimuli, a finding that is predicted by associative learning theories. The finding of competition between pre-trial cues that predict incompatible trials, but not cues that predict compatible trials, suggests that different strategic processes may occur during adaptation to conflict when different kinds of trials are expected.

Dynamics of cognitive control: Theoretical bases, paradigms, and a view for the future

“…For instance, in the Eriksen flanker task, when trial N is congruent (i.e., there is compatibility between target and noise features, e.g., >>>>>), this may reinforce the association between noise features and responses, leading to an increased conflict effect to incongruent stimuli on the subsequent trial (i.e., trial N11) as compared to when the target and noise features were incongruent at trial N. A similar effect can be obtained by using external, arbitrary cues that are associated with different probabilities of subsequent congruent and incongruent trials. This conflict adaptation effect was first reported by Gratton, Coles, and Donchin (1992; see also Botvinick, Braver, Barch, Carter, & Cohen, 2001;Ghinescu, Schachtman, Gratton, & Fabiani, 2016;Ghinescu, Schachtman, Stadler, Fabiani, & Gratton, 2010;Von Gunten, Volpert-Esmond, & Bartholow, 2018), and is generally considered as a classic example of a cognitive control phenomenon, in which the attention weights assigned to different stimulus features are dynamically changed depending on their expected utility. Using Miyake and Friedman's terminology, conflict adaptation can be viewed as a shifting phenomenon, since the relationships between specific cues and responses exist in advance of the trial in which the effect is observed.…”

Spontaneous Alpha and Theta Oscillations Are Related to Complementary Aspects of Cognitive Control in Younger and Older Adults

“… 4 Previous work (Ghinescu et al, 2016 ) has shown that behavior does not change across experimental blocks in cued-flanker tasks. There was no age-group by experimental block interaction in this study and thus block was not used as a factor in these ANOVAs.…”

Temporal and spatial contiguity are necessary for competition between events.

“…A large history of research has confirmed the reliability of overshadowing and blocking across species and types of learning (including invertebrate species, e.g., Acebes et al, 2009, in garden snails; Prados et al, 2013, in planaria). Focusing on human research, overshadowing has been reported in different learning domains, including spatial learning (Buckley et al, 2019, 2021; Chamizo, 2003; Prados, 2011), contingency judgements (Price & Yates, 1993), fear conditioning (Haesen et al, 2017), evaluative conditioning (Kattner & Green, 2015), multisensory recognition test (Stahlman et al, 2018), and cognitive control tasks (Ghinescu et al, 2016).…”