Cognitive control of conflicting visual features despite urgency
Wed-Main hall - Z2a-Poster 3-8707
Presented by: Anika Krause
Cognitive control ensures that in conflict situations, humans can coordinate information from the environment with their internal goals, in order to react in a goal-driven manner. Previous studies revealed, that cognitive control is heavily influenced by urgency. In high-urgency situations, it was shown, that reactions in a cognitive control task are dominated by stimulus-driven information rather than goal-directed information. Critically, however, most previous studies used cognitive control tasks that involved a 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 a task, that evokes a stimulus-stimulus conflict between similarly processed stimuli. In two experiments, an urgency paradigm was applied to two Eriksen Flanker tasks, one using color stimuli and the other one using letter stimuli. In both experiments, urgency did not evoke a dominance of stimulus-driven information over goal-directed information and thus a drop of performance below chance level in the incongruent condition. These findings could suggest, that urgency does not impact cognitive control for all stimuli. Rather, urgency could affect cognitive control only for conflicts arising from an efficiently processed stimulus-dimension (such as space), leaving cognitive conflicts from equally processed stimulus-dimensions unaffected.
Keywords: Cognitive Control, Cognitive Conflict, Urgency, Eriksen Flanker Task