ArticleFrontiers in psychology2015
Does conflict help or hurt cognitive control? Initial evidence for an inverted U-shape relationship between perceived task difficulty and conflict adaptation.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Meta-analytic evidence for the complex mechanisms underlying congruency sequence effect.Psychological research · 2025Pooled it
- Article
- Multivariate Decoding and Drift-Diffusion Modeling Reveal Adaptive Control in Trilingual Comprehension.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Distributional analyses reveal the individual differences in congruency sequence effect.PloS one · 2022Article
- Acute exercise effects on inhibitory control and the pupillary response in young adults.International journal of psychophysiology : official journal of the International Organization of Psychophysiology · 2021Article
- Homeschooling during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic: the role of students' trait self-regulation and task attributes of daily learning tasks for students' daily self-regulation.Zeitschrift fur Erziehungswissenschaft : ZfE · 2021Article
- Detrimental Effects of Restricted Cage Size on Reproductive Performance, Exploration Ability, and Anxiety but Not Working Memory of Kunming Mice.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- The Specificity and Reliability of Conflict Adaptation: A Mouse-Tracking Study.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- The face of control: Corrugator supercilii tracks aversive conflict signals in the service of adaptive cognitive control.Psychophysiology · 2020Article
- The role of the opioid system in decision making and cognitive control: A review.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2019Review
- Reappraising cognitive control: normal reactive adjustments following conflict processing are abolished by proactive emotion regulation.Psychological research · 2019Article
- Pupil dilation as an index of effort in cognitive control tasks: A review.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2018Review
- A locus coeruleus-norepinephrine account of individual differences in working memory capacity and attention control.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2017Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
Sequential modulation of congruency effects in conflict tasks indicates that cognitive control quickly adapts to changing task demands. We investigated in four experiments how this behavioral congruency-sequence effect relates to different levels of perceived task difficulty in a flanker and a Stroop task. In addition, online measures of pupil diameter were used as a physiological index of effort mobilization. Consistent with motivational accounts predicting that increased levels of perceived task difficulty will increase effort mobilization only up to a certain limit, reliable dynamic conflict-driven adjustment in cognitive control was only observed when task difficulty was relatively low. Instead, tasks tentatively associated with high levels of difficulty showed no or reversed conflict adaptation. Although the effects could not be linked consistently to effects in self-reported task difficulty in all experiments, regression analyses showed associations between perceived task difficulty and conflict adaptation in some of the experiments, which provides some initial evidence for an inverted U-shape relationship between perceived difficulty and adaptations in cognitive control. Furthermore, high levels of task difficulty were associated with a conflict-driven reduction in pupil dilation, suggesting that pupil dilation can be used as a physiological marker of mental overload. Our findings underscore the importance of developing models that are grounded in motivational accounts of cognitive control.
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