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 emphasising 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. A re-analysis 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 show that responding to conflict clearly changes its affective evaluation fitting with the idea that creating outcome expectancies (lower expectancies for being correct on incongruent trials) makes the experience of conflict less negative.

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

“…This perspective aligns with reinforcement learning theories, which have posited that the aversive evaluation of conflict can be inferred from task performance based on the lowered reward expectancy for incongruent compared to congruent trials 46,47 . Furthermore, our finding that individuals started to perceive conflict more positive as irrelevant capture diminished over time aligns with the idea that successfully resolving conflict can be experienced as rewarding, or at least more positive, and this seems to be driven by changes in the underlying reward expectancies [47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54] .…”

The selective use of punishments on congruent versus incongruent trials in the Stroop task

“…For each and every participant, a stringent and individually-calibrated response deadline was used, and on average, they all received punishment on half the trials. Hence, the frequent and unavoidable negative feedback (informing about monetary loss) likely counteracted the rewarding nature of conflict resolution (Braem et al, 2015;Ivanchei, Braem, Vermeylen, & Notebaert, 2021;Kohli et al, 2018;Schouppe et al, 2015). In comparison, in the P-FB-C sessions, the successful resolution of conflict (on incongruent trials) was not challenged by the evaluative (and often negative, lossrelated) feedback since it followed congruent trials selectively, in turn enabling a boost in adaptive reactive control, as shown by enhanced conflict adaptation in this condition.…”

Unequal resource division occurs in the absence of group division and identity

“…Social interactions may be less enjoyable in the presence of neural conflict, with negative emotions arising potentially resulting in a tendency to disadvantage the other. This line of thinking allows for new discrimination studies to emerge based prior research into the negative valence of conflict in the brain and associated behavioral changes 26,[43][44][45][46] . Of course, further research that can corroborate this proposed neural mechanism would be welcomed.…”