Is cognitive conflict really effortful? Conflict priming and shielding effects on cardiac response

Abstract

Two experiments with N = 221 university students investigated the impact of primed cognitive conflict on effort assessed as cardiac response in tasks that were not conflict‐related themselves. Manifest cognitive conflict in cognitive control tasks is confounded with objective response difficulty (e.g., in incongruent Stroop task trials). This makes conclusions about the effortfulness of cognitive conflict itself difficult. We bypassed this problem by administrating pictures of congruent versus incongruent Stroop task stimuli as conflict primes. As predicted, primed cognitive conflict increased cardiac pre‐ejection period (PEP) responses in an easy attention task in Experiment 1. Accordingly, cognitive conflict itself is indeed effortful. This effect was replicated in an easy short‐term memory task in Experiment 2. Moreover, as further predicted, the primed cognitive conflict effect on PEP reactivity disappeared when participants could personally choose task characteristics. This latter effect corresponds to other recent evidence showing that personal action choice shields against incidental affective influences on action execution and especially on effort‐related cardiovascular response.

Action‐orientation shields against primed cognitive conflict effects on effort‐related cardiac response

“…Our main results further extend and generalize recent findings on the action-shielding model (Gendolla et al, 2021). Beyond the momentary shielding effect of the personal choice of tasks or task characteristics (see Bouzidi & Gendolla, 2023a;Falk et al, 2022aFalk et al, , 2022bFramorando et al, 2023), our study provides first evidence that dispositional capacities related to volitional shielding skills are sufficient to protect individuals against negative affective stimulation like cognitive conflict. Some readers might have noted that the internal consistency of the ACS-Fr Preoccupation was not very high (though not low) in the present study.…”

“…The present findings contribute to both recent research on conflict priming effects on effort-related cardiac response and shielding against incidental affective influences on action execution. We replicated the effect that primed cognitive conflict increases PEP responses during the performance of a task that was neither difficult nor conflictrelated itself (Bouzidi & Gendolla, 2023a). Most relevant, we found first evidence for the moderating effect of individual differences in action-state orientation in this process.…”

“…Non-conflict primes findings Bouzidi and Gendolla (2023a). relevant, individual differences in action-state orientation moderated this conflict prime main effect.…”

“…Most relevant, additional analyses found no evidence for significant links between baseline mood or task-related mood changes with PEP reactivity, meaning that self-reported mood could hardly explain our PEP effects. Mirroring the findings by Bouzidi and Gendolla (2023a), the lack of manipulation effects on mood may also suggest that participants did not experience a conscious affective influence of the conflict primes. Even though null effects are hardly interpretable, the lack of effect on conscious affect fits the idea that the conflict primes' impact on PEP reactivity worked through an implicit affective influence on subjective task demand during task performance.…”

“…2 Previous studies manipulating affect-related variables-including conflict primes-found significant effects of medium size on PEP reactivity with such sample sizes (e.g., Bouzidi & Gendolla, 2023a;Falk et al, 2022aFalk et al, , 2022bFramorando & Gendolla, 2018;Gendolla et al, 2021).…”