The Aging Study Of Conflict Control Strategy

In our daily life, we often face some difficult and complicated situations, in this timewe need to make a choice and judgment of the wide range of information, and calledcognitive resources to processing and controlling the information, in order to make peopleovercome the difficulties successfully. Conflict control is an important part of thecomponents of cognitive control process, refers to individuals restrain the information whichhas no relationship with the task, and overcome the conflict in the competition situation, thisprocess reflects the ability of monitoring and solving conflict. According to the DualMechanisms of Cognitive Control Account, conflict control strategy can be divided into twoforms, which is proactive control strategy and reactive control strategy, this two conflictcontrol strategies work together in the processing of conflict resolution. proactive controlneed individuals activating the clues sustainedly, greatly influenced by top-down informationprocessing. And reactive control means temporary activation of prior information before thereaction, it greatly influenced by bottom-up information process. In different situations, thistwo conflict control strategies adjustment flexibly, people selected the most advantageousway to solve the current difficulties.Nowadays, the elderly mental health problem has become a hot spot of the researchers.While, according to the growth of the age, the control ability to solve the conflict in theelderly has also drops, to study the conflict control strategy of the elder people can help andguide the elderly solve the difficulties in life better.The study of consciousness and conflict control has also become a focus of researchers,under the condition of consciousness can cause conflict control is a fact which has noobjection, but whether under the unconscious conditions can cause the conflict control is stillhas a lot of debate, and the number of research of the relationship between conflict controlstrategy and different consciousness situations are much less.This study wants to explore the differences of control strategy between the older and theyoung adults, and the relationship between consciousness and conflict control strategy. Wehad choosen the elder adults and the college students as subjects, and designed twoexperiments, the experiment one discussed the difference of conflict control strategy betweenelder adults and young adults, the experiment two use consciousness as an independent variable in order to explore the relationship of conflict control strategy and consciousness inelder adults and young adults. We use a digital Stroop task which operates the differentproportion of conflict to study these questions, the difference of this two experiments is thatthe experiment two is masking the prime stimulation before and after, to make the primestimulation in a state of unconscious condition.The results of Experiment one found that:(1) According to the reaction time results, theelder adults and young adults are all adopting the proactive control strategy in differentconflict situations, but the ability of proactive control in young people is stronger than theelder adults in the high conflict situations. In different conflict situations, the elder adultstaken reactive conflict control strategy while young adults haven’t shown this phenomenon.(2) According to the accuracy results, this two groups of participants did not show theproactive control strategy, but the two groups of subjects showed the use of reactive controlstrategy.The results of Experiment two found that:(1) According to the reaction time results, underthe unconscious state, young and old are all use the proactive control strategy to controlconflict, but the ability of proactive control in young person is stronger than the elderly, andthe affect of unconscious conflict interference is bigger in young group, under theunconscious condition,elderly people show the trend of reactive control while young peopledon’t show the reactive control strategy.(2) According to the accuracy results, theperformance for the young person have shown proactive control strategy, but both subjectshave not shown the reactive control.Based on the above results, our study showed the reactive control strategy is notweakened with age, but the proactive control strategy has weakened with age. Under theunconscious condition, both group of subjects can control the conflict, while young peoplecan control the conflict better than the old.