ArticleAttention, perception & psychophysics2025
Urgency overpowers cognitive control by amplifying cognitive processing asymmetries.
Article in Attention, perception & psychophysics, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cognitive control is the functional backbone of intelligent behavior, because it allows to act according to one's intentions, even when the environment elicits opposed behaviors. Recently, it has been shown that reactions under urgency in a cognitive control task are dominated by stimulus-driven information and goal-directed actions are overpowered, as reflected by a temporary drop in performance below chance level in conflict situations. This effect was shown for eye movements as well as manual cognitive control tasks. Crucially, most previous studies used tasks that involved a natural processing asymmetry between the stimulus-driven information and the goal-directed information, leaving it unclear whether urgency affects cognitive control in general. Here, we investigated whether urgency also impacts performance in tasks that evoke a stimulus-stimulus conflict between similarly processed stimuli. Therefore, urgency was applied to two Eriksen flanker tasks, one using color stimuli, the other one using letter stimuli. In both experiments, urgency did not lead to a drop in performance below chance level in conflict situations, meaning that goal-directed behavior could be maintained. In a third experiment, an Eriksen flanker task with letter stimuli and a stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) of 120 ms between the appearance of the flanker stimuli and the target stimulus, urgency evoked a large drop in performance below chance level. These results reveal that the effect of urgency on cognitive control is based on an amplification of cognitive processing asymmetries induced by urgency and is thus specific for tasks involving processing asymmetries, thereby evoking early-onset cognitive conflicts.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.