The Conflict-driven Cognitive Control: Local Or Global?

Conflict monitoring theory was the main theory which explained the mechanism of conflict interference effect, and congruency sequence effect (CSE, the effect that the interference effect was smaller following an incongruent trial than following a congruent trial) was the most important empirical evidence for Conflict monitoring theory. After the presence of congruency sequence effect was identified, for purpose of exploring the effect more deeply, researchers investigated the scope of conflict-driven cognitive control. Suppose the experiment included more than one task type, if the control was global, a generic conflict signal was sent to all active task representations without identifying the current task and then revoked the cognitive control. This process was very efficient, because as long as the monitor to any conflict, you could adjust to all the tasks. If the control was local, the conflict signal specifically modulated the active task representation, without affecting other tasks. This was due to the conflict monitor system was not only monitor the amount of conflict but also identified the source of the conflict.Recently, a number of behavior researches which used different task paradigm have examined the scope of cognitive control. However, there was heated debate on that the conflict-driven cognitive control whether local or global. We found that the stimulus-response set was always 2 in the previous studies of factorial task-crossing that investigate the scope of the conflict-driven cognitive control, which could not eliminate the feature integration effect and would then be confounded with cognitive control. In order to systematically investigate the scope of the conflict-driven cognitive control, the present study would consider the size of stimulus-response set and task type at the same time. Experiment 1 used the factorial task-crossing task which contained Flanker task and Simon task and stimulus-response set was 2, the result indicated that the within-task and cross-task congruency sequence effect were both present, in other words, the cognitive control was global. Experiment 2 used the factorial task-crossing task which contained Stroop task and Simon task and stimulus-response set was 2, the result indicated that the only within-task congruency sequence effect was present, i.e., the cognitive control acted locally. So as to eliminate the feature integration effect, Experiment 3 and 4 used the factorial task-crossing task which contained Flanker task and Simon task, Stroop task and Simon task, respectively; and more importantly, the stimulus-response sets were increase to 4, and the results indicated that within-task congruency sequence effect was present, however, there was no cross-task congruency sequence effect, i.e., the cognitive control acted locally. As the conflict monitoring theory did not make the particular discuss for the scope of the conflict-driven cognitive control, therefore, the results of the present study was an extension of the conflict monitoring theory. Coupled with the conflict monitoring was an influential theory for the mechanism of cognitive control, therefore, the present study had some theoretical meaning for exploring the mechanism of cognitive control. In addition, the present had systematically investigated the scope of the conflict-driven cognitive control, and suggested the importance of eliminating the feature integration effect, which had several referred values for the difference of the studies that investigate the scope of the conflict-driven cognitive control.