Conflict modification: predictable production of congruent situations facilitates responding in a stroop task

Are self-caused distractors easier to ignore? Experiments with the flanker task

Four experiments are reported that investigate the relationship between action-outcome learning and the ability to ignore distractors. Each participant performed 600 acquisition trials, followed by 200 test trials. In the acquisition phase, participants were presented with a fixed action-outcome contingency (e.g., Key #1 ➔ green distractors), while that contingency was reversed in the test phase. In Experiments 1-3, a distractor feature depended on the participants' action. In Experiment 1, actions determined the color of the distractors; in Experiment 2, they determined the target-distractor distance; in Experiment 3, they determined target-distractor compatibility. Results suggest that with the relatively simple features (color and distance), exposure to action-outcome contingencies changed distractor cost, whereas with the complex or relational feature (target-distractor compatibility), exposure to the contingencies did not affect distractor cost. In Experiment 4, the same pattern of results was found (effect of contingency learning on distractor cost) with perceptual sequence learning, using visual cues ("X" vs. "O") instead of actions. Thus, although the mechanism of associative learning may not be unique to actions, such learning plays a role in the allocation of attention to task-irrelevant events.

Situation selection and cognitive conflict: explicit knowledge is necessary for conflict avoidance

Humans transform their environment in order to regulate their own affect. One way to do so is to avoid situations that come with negative rather than positive affect. This selection might not solely bear on expectations of full-blown emotions, but may also be invoked by anticipating the aversiveness of cognitive conflict, when a situation suggests competing behavioural responses. If cognitive conflict is indeed aversive, it may trigger affect regulation goals, which in turn influence choices of situations depending on the magnitude of conflict they contain. People should prefer actions that produce conflict-free situations to actions that produce conflicting situations. In three experiments, participants had to solve a Stroop task by freely choosing between response keys that were either associated with low-conflict or high-conflict in the subsequent trial. We find that people do not automatically prefer actions associated with conflict-free situations to actions that are associated with conflicting situations. They only do so, when they are explicitly informed about the contingency between action and congruency of an upcoming situation. This suggests that cognitive conflict, at least at the level of a standard conflict task as used here, is insufficient to invoke affect regulation processes.