Why phasic alerting increases congruency effects in conflict tasks is a matter of debate. A key question in this debate concerns the role of spatial information processing as a linking factor between alerting and cognitive control. Specifically, it has been proposed that the alerting-congruency interaction may arise only when the target or the task goal conveys spatial information. In this experiment, I tested the idea of a dependency on a spatial task goal. To this end, I used a flanker task in which the target was a left-/right-oriented triangle in one of two colours that was surrounded by flankers of the same or the opposite orientation (orientation-congruent vs. -incongruent) and having the same or the other colour (colour-congruent vs. -incongruent). To vary the nature of the task goal, I let participants respond to the target’s orientation in one half of the experiment (spatial task goal), and to its colour in the other half (non-spatial task goal). To induce phasic alertness, I presented an alerting signal (AS) in half of the trials. As expected, participants (N = 31) responded faster in congruent than in incongruent trials, and this effect was larger in trials with an AS. Crucially, this alerting-congruency interaction was observed irrespective of whether the task goal was spatial or non-spatial, which suggests that it does not depend on a spatial task goal to emerge. Instead, the alerting-congruency interaction may depend on a target conveying spatial information or the potential of a task to induce direct stimulus-response associations.