ArticlePsychophysiology2023
Is cognitive conflict really effortful? Conflict priming and shielding effects on cardiac response.
Article in Psychophysiology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 15 citations in OpenAlex.
- Revisiting the post-resolution positivity effect in conflict tasks: Meta-analytic and behavioral evidence for context-dependent affective valence of conflict resolution.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Pooled it
- The experience of cognitive conflict is intrinsically rewarding.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Temporal dynamics of students' physiological arousal in personalized learning contexts: a quasi-experimental study based on electrodermal activity.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- The Role of Cognitive Effort in Emotion Regulation.Affective science · 2025Review
- Affective Influences on the Intensity of Mental Effort: 25 Years of Programmatic Research.Emotion review : journal of the International Society for Research on Emotion · 2025Article
- Is cognitive conflict really effortful? Conflict priming and shielding effects on cardiac response.Psychophysiology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.