The Cognitive Control Of Impression Formation On Perception Conflict

Individuals can adjust their own perceptual load and self-control resources based on perceptual selectivity, response bias and real-time updated situations so as to promote the current perception of information with flexible coding adaptively. This process is the cognitive control of impression formation. Cognitive control restrains dominant, automatic prepotent response so as to comply individual behaviors with social norms and contribute to long-term goals. When conflicts between other’s information perceived by individuals, cognitive control, as one of the most adaptative feature of human’s psychological system, has the ability to process predicted as well as the unpredicted information. From the perspective of perception conflict, this research investigated the strategies and their effects of the cognitive control of different conflicting informations when percipients are formating impression of others, by using Flanker/Eriksen paradigm, Stroop paradigm of lexical meaning, masked priming paradigm, probe detection task, ego depletion task, the analysis technics of quadruple process model, affective priming paradigm, task switching paradigm, stereotypic explanatory bias paradigm and other research methods. The main conclusions of this research are as follows:(1) The cognitive control of impression formation of others depends on perceptual load. When perception conflict occurs in two kinds of information, and the perceptual load is high, the impression formation affected by reactive control, may be liable to conflict adaptation, while the perceptual load is low, affected by active control, impression formation is prone to conflict prevention.(2) The cognitive control mechanism of impression formation is affected by the intensity of conflicting information. When the conflicting information perceived is under the subliminal level, impression formation is influenced by reactive control, and when it is above the subliminal level, impression formation is influenced by proactive control.(3) The cognitive control of impression formation depends on self-control resources. When the valences of conflicting information are consistent(both positive or negative), individuals take more self-control resources to activate clues through proactive control strategies. While the valences of conflicting information are contradictory(positive vs. negative), individuals lack reliable clues because of losing self-control resources, thus they are likely to take proactive control strategies based on the real-time updated information of situations.(4) The presented sequence of conflicting information affects impression control. When conflicting information appears simultaneously, individuals use more self-control resources to make mental representation in proactive control. Comparatively, when conflicting information appears successively, two major features of the cognitive control are observed—first, former conflicting clues contribute to better adaptation of successive conflicting information and resort impression process to reactive control; and, second, when the reactive control happens without awareness, individuals may prevent the reactive control by proactive control.In conclusion, the type, intensity, valences and presented sequence of conflicting information can adjust the cognitive control of impression formation based on individuals’ perceptual load and self-control resources.