Correct responses alleviate the negative evaluation of conflict

Abstract

Recent studies have demonstrated that cognitive conflict, as experienced during incongruent Stroop-trials, is automatically evaluated as negative in line with theories emphasizing the aversive nature of conflict. However, while this is well-replicated when people only see the conflict stimuli, results are mixed when participants also respond to stimuli before evaluating them. Potentially, the positive surprise people feel when overcoming the conflict, allows them to evaluate the experience as more positive. In this study, we investigated whether task experience can account for contradictory findings in the literature. Across three experiments, we observed that responding to incongruent stimuli was evaluated as negative on the first trials, but this effect disappeared after 32 trials. This contrasted with the results of a fourth experiment showing that the negative evaluation of incongruent trials did not disappear, when participants could not respond to the conflict. Finally, a reanalysis of three older experiments corroborated these results by showing that a positive evaluation of conflict only occurred after participants had some experience with the task. These results fit with the idea that we need to create outcome expectancies (lower expectancies for being correct on incongruent trials) before we can experience the resolution of conflict as positive.

The Temporal Dynamics of Metacognitive Experiences Track Rational Adaptations in Task Performance

“…Particularly, when levels of irrelevant capture shift over time, our normative model simulations showed that one should adapt their decision boundary in response to these changes to compensate for the newly available potential reward rate. However, our results do not suggest that such subjective estimates (e.g., conflict aversiveness) directly promote strategic adaptations (aligning perhaps with mixed findings regarding the role of subjective estimates in guiding trial-by-trial adaptations [57][58][59] ). Instead, we found that conflict aversiveness indirectly guides adaptations of the decision boundary through feelings of exerted effort, frustration and fatigue.…”

“…Particularly, when levels of irrelevant capture shift over time, individuals must adapt their decision boundary in response to these changes to compensate for the newly available potential reward rate, as demonstrated by our simulations. However, our results do not show that such subjective estimates (e.g., conflict aversiveness) necessarily promote strategic adaptations (aligning with mixed findings regarding the role of subjective estimates in guiding trial-by-trial adaptations 57–59 ). Instead, we found that the metacognitive experiences of frustration and fatigue were more closely related to strategic changes.…”