Making sense of all the conflict: A theoretical review and critique of conflict-related ERPs

Chronic cannabis use and ERP correlates of visual selective attention during the performance of a flanker go/nogo task

“…Although there is some controversy within the literature, the N2 nogo effect is more often interpreted to represent a response inhibition mechanism, and the N2 congruency effect is often interpreted to index a conflict detection process (see Folstein & Van Petten, 2008;Larson et al, 2014). In the present study, the control group but not the cannabis group showed a significant N2 nogo effect when flanker stimuli were incongruent.…”

“…Frontal N2 amplitude is also modulated during the performance of flanker tasks, such that amplitude is enhanced on incongruent relative to congruent trials (Heil et al, 2000;Kopp et al, 1996). While some have argued for a response inhibition explanation for the N2 congruency effect (see Folstein & Van Petten, 2008), others have argued that it reflects a conflict detection process that is mediated by the ACC (see Larson, Clayson, & Clawson, 2014). There is some evidence that the congruency effect is sensitive to the degree of attention directed toward flanker relative to target stimuli, and on correct trials, greater N2 amplitude has been associated with longer RT (Larson et al, 2014).…”

The congruency sequence effect emerges when the distracter precedes the target

“…First, complementing our recent prior work (Schmidt & Weissman, 2014;Weissman et al, 2014), they indicate an approach for observing robust CSEs without feature integration or contingency learning confounds. As discussed in several prior reviews of the literature (Egner, 2007;Larson, Clayson, & Clawson, 2014;Schmidt, 2013), the vast majority of previous behavioral, fMRI, EEG, and lesion studies of the CSE contain one or both of these confounds. Therefore, by providing a protocol for observing robust CSEs without such confounds, our work may aid future attempts to isolate control processes that minimize the influence of irrelevant stimuli on performance, including their underlying neural mechanisms.…”

Error monitoring is related to processing internal affective states

“…Because the N 450 is thought to reflect conflict detection in the Stroop task (Larson, Clayson, & Clawson, 2014), it should be suited to investigate whether alexithymia level, affective content of the task set or both are related to conflict detection in the Stroop task.…”