Comparing Conscious and Unconscious Conflict Adaptation

Kobe Desender, Elke Van Lierde and Eva Van den Bussche

PLOS ONE, 2013, vol. 8, issue 2, 1-9

Abstract: Recently, researchers have been trying to unravel the function of consciousness by exploring whether unconscious information is (in)capable of exerting cognitive control. Theoretically, cognitive control functions, such as conflict adaptation, have often been assumed to require consciousness. However, empirical evidence on conscious versus unconscious conflict adaptation is highly contradictory and hitherto, only one study reliably demonstrated adaptation to unconscious conflict. Therefore, the current study wanted to shed further light on this debated issue. A masked and unmasked version of the priming paradigm were used to create unconscious and conscious conflict trials (i.e., when prime and target trigger opposite responses). In contrast to previous studies, the Stimulus Onset Asynchrony was kept constant in both conditions and neutral trials were added to the design in order to investigate the origin of the adaptation and to investigate the specific adaptation effects. Our results showed robust conflict adaptation effects following conscious and unconscious conflict. Furthermore, our results suggest that the adaptation elicited by the conflict, is mainly an adaptation of interference, not of facilitation. We can conclude that conflict adaptation can occur after unconscious conflict, which indicates that this expression of cognitive control is most likely not an exclusive function of consciousness.

Date: 2013
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0055976 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 55976&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0055976

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0055976

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().