The General Field Of Cognitive Surveillance: The Impact Of Conflict Adaptation On Gender Stereotypes

In many situations of life, cognitive control is needed to maintain focus on the current task at hand until it’s complete. Limited processing capacity of the sensory system decide that there is impossible and no need to process all external information. Therefore, selective attention plays an important role in maintaining and organizing mental activity. When judging the valence of stimuli, participants will strategically allocate attention to distracters if chances are good that they will be effective congruent with the target and thereby provide predictive validity. Because of this unique processing mechanism, response time is slowed on incompatible relative to compatible trials, there is so-called "conflict effect". Human task performance is continuously influenced by the context in which it occurs. Meanwhile, past experience modulates all aspects of human information processing, including perception, attention, memory, and many other higher cognitive activities. Previous work suggests that conflict adaptation involves top-down recruitment of cognitive control. Psychologists often use the conflict adaptation effects (CAE) to simulate the effect of previous experience on the subsequent behavior experience in real life.The conflicting information is not only a purely cognition, but also contains society-related information. For example, there is a conflict associated with stereotype. Based on the mechanism of stereotypes, the stereotypical information is saved as schema in the long-term memory, and according to these schemes to guide the current process of information processing. To judge whether the current information is consistent with the stereotype is actually a kind of conflict detection. When the information are in conflict with stereotypes, the individual requires more cognitive resources to complete the current task. We can see that cognitive control is needed during the stereotypical information processing.This study focused on the extent of the conflicts conflict:extent adaptations to conflict are domain-general or rather specific. The modulating role cognitive control plays in the expression of implicit bias, coupled with the high social and personal significance of the goal not to be (or appear) biased, makes the assessment of implicit bias especially suitable for examining whether personal significance can facilitate adjustment of control across domains. This study uses gender stereotypes that tie together females and weakness and males and strength, combined with Eriksen Flanker task to generate a Gender Flanker task. In Experiment 1, we used this Gender Flanker task to examine participants’response manner is in line with the pattern reflected common gender stereotypes, which is similar with the conflict effect of traditional Flanker tasks. In Experiment 2, we intermixed trials of a classic Flanker task with trials of a Gender Flanker task, composed of stereotype congruent and stereotype incongruent stimuli. In Experiment 3, we used conflict observation paradigm by changing stimulus (arrows, or stereotypical names and adjectives) of two contiguous Flanker trials, and tested whether control over the expression of stereotypes, a highly meaningful and desirable goal for many, can benefit from control readiness evoked by a neutral unrelated Flanker task. Participants were asked to look at the screen without pressing the button in the arrow observation Flanker trail, and judge whether the name was a female or a male name by key-pressing activity. In conclusion, this study finally got the following main conclusions:1. Cognitive conflict detection system and response conflicts play important roles in stereotype threat effects. In gender Flanker task, responses to stereotypical names reflected the common stereotypes; namely, response times will be shorter for stereotype congruent versus stereotype incongruent stimuli This effect does not have gender differences.2. The conflict adaptation effects didn’t occur during a task-switching design. Conflict information form a neutral arrow Flanker trial didn’t impact the next gender Flanker trial.3. Conflict information form a conflict observation arrow Flanker trial did impact the next gender Flanker trial. Under this condition, conflict adaptation effect can be across the situation, and there is no difference between male and female.