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Conflict Adaptation/ Cognitive Control Revision
Conflict Adaptation

Cognitive control plays a vital role in thinking, planning, and everyday life decisions in order to meet individual goals. Cognitive control allows individuals to selectively attend to a certain task, by ignoring distractions. For example, students use cognitive control when they choose to ignore distracting conversations around them in order to fulfill their chosen task of studying. In the Stroop task, anything that reduces interference when an incongruent trial occurs immediately after another incongruent trial rather than a congruent trial, refers to conflict adaptation, also known as cognitive control. Individuals use thought processes to make controlled or automatic decisions in their everyday life. Cognitive control is vital to individuals when automatic processing does not apply. It is necessary in situations when a task requires selective attention, such as thinking and reasoning, while choosing to ignore other distractions. Cognitive control enables individuals to carry out tasks to the best of their ability. Psychologists have discussed top-down processing, bottom-up processing, and priming as some of the mechanisms underlying cognitive control.

During the Stroop task a word is given an ink color. There are two types of trials in this task: congruent trials and incongruent trials. A congruent trial is when the meaning of the word and ink color match. Yet, an incongruent trial is when the meaning of the word and ink color do not match. This task challenges individuals to differentiate between congruent and incongruent trials, also known as the congruency effect. In an incongruent trial, individuals use cognitive control to ignore the semantic meaning of the word and simply state its color. Cognitive control allows individuals to make these conscious decisions during the Stroop task. The conflict during a specific trial of the Stroop task does not rely solely on the conflict of the preceding trial, but on the average of the multiple trials before. Therefore, the context of the overall series of trials is significant to the results of the Stroop task.

Some of the mechanisms underlying conflict adaptation can be explained through top-down processing. During top-down processing individuals are tempted to quickly identify the word instead of the color during the Stroop task because individuals are focused on the word rather than the item-specific features (ink color). Researchers have debated whether top-down processing is the only mechanism underlying cognitive control or if there are other mechanisms involved. It has been concluded that other processes such as bottom-up processing also aid in making decisions, task-related or not.

Not only is top-down processing used during the Stroop task, but also stimulus-driven control contributes to an individual’s attention  This alternate view of processing shows that cognitive control can have multiple levels. Stimuli, such as the congruent or incongruent words in the Stroop task, cause this kind of bottom-up control. Bottom-up processing is when individuals focus on the item-specific features (ink color) of the item (word). Cognitive control also enables individuals to identify these item-specific features.

Today, psychologists often debate whether the Stroop effect results from priming mechanisms, also known as the repetitions of congruent trials. More specifically, priming is when a certain stimulus influences an individual to believe a similar stimulus will follow. For example, when an individual sees multiple congruent trials, they often expect the subsequent trial to be congruent as well.

Psychologists are still debating whether automatic or controlled processing, specifically cognitive control, is used in the Stroop task.

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