Research On Consciousness And Unconscious Conflict Control Based On Flanker Paradigm

Cognitive control has been a hot topic in psychological research. It was thought that consciousness is the prerequisite of cognitive control. However, an overwhelming body of research has shown that many cognitive processes can occur unconsciously. Although subjects can not aware of the prime, it can also influence subsequent behavior, including conflict control, response inhibition, task switching and so on.Much research on unconscious cognitive control was done under the subliminal priming paradigm. In this paradigm subjects have to respond to a target which is preceded by an irrelevant prime, and between the prime and the target, a mask flashes quickly. In previous studies, some researchers varied the SOA to create a conscious and unconscious condition, and some researchers matched the SOA between both conditions, but failed to keep the prime duration constant. But we think that when the SOA and prime duration are not perfectly matched between both conditions, different influence may be exerted on subsequent behavior in conscious and unconscious condition. Therefore, present study matches the SOA and prime duration in both conditions, and uses different clues to improve the level of cognitive control. The aim of our study is to compare the differences between conscious and unconscious cognitive control.The three experiments in present research use the variant version of Flanker paradigm, which separates the flankers and the target. With Experiment 1,we tested whether Flanker effect could appear conscious and unconscious conditions. The result shows that in both conditions, Flanker effect is very stable. Moreover, the conflict effect in conscious condition is larger than that in unconscious condition. In Experiment 2, an explicit cue was used to trigger voluntary cognitive control in the two conditions. The conflict effect is reduced in conscious and unconscious conditions, and the degree of reduction under unconscious condition is larger than that under conscious condition. In experiment 3,conflict frequency as an implicit clue was used to trigger sustained cognitive control in both conditions. The result suggests that conflict effect is also reduced in both conditions. The conflict effect in unconscious condition almost disappear, but it reduces a lot in conscious condition.According to the results of the three experiments, we concluded that:(1) The conflict effect in conscious condition is larger than that in unconscious condition, which suggests that conscious and unconscious conflict control may have different processing mechanisms, and they belongs to two relatively independent cognitive control modules.(2) Both of the voluntary cognitive control and sustained cognitive control have a greater influence on the conscious cognitive control than on unconscious cognitive control.(3) The efficiency of sustained cognitive control is larger than it of voluntary cognitive control, which suggests the voluntary cognitive control and the sustained cognitive control may operate via different cognitive control module.