The Domain Question And Mechanism Research Of Cognitive Control

Cognitive control is an ability of individuals to flexibly adjust thought-s and beha viors and regulate conflict between relevant information and irrelevant information in the face of the task requirement. Many contexts of everyday life require the participation of cognitive control which can ensure our behavior,activities carried out in line with the expected purpose, which raise a problem that exist a single control mechanism that flexibly resolves different conflicts or by several specialized conflict control loops that can operate in parallel? It isn’t clear in previous studies. Therefore, on the basis of previous research, under the Dual Mechanisms of Control frame, we designed two experiments used practice-transfer designs and factorial task-crossing designs to explore the two kinds of conflict control(proactive control and reactive control) is domain-general or domain-special.Experiment one used word RED and BLUE respectively printed in red or blue as stimulus material, selected the Stroop task and Simon task, and used practice-transfer designs and factorial task-crossing designs to explore the domain of cognitive control. Two kinds of stimulus material may be lead to the confusion of proportion congruent effect produced in training phase between stimulus-response connection and real cognitive control. Therefore, based on the experiment one, experiment two increase stimulus material in training phase, that is used word RED, BLUE,YELLOW,GREEN respectively printed in red, blue, yellow, green as stimulus material, choosing the same tasks and paradigms as the experiment one to further explore the domain of cognitive control.The results of experiment one show that the sequence consistency effect only appear in within-task but no cross-task, indicating sequential congruent effect is domain-special. Proportion congruent effect in post-training phase was found only in the Stroop task but not in Simon task, which showed that proactive control reflected by proportion congruent effect is domain specific. Experiment two, ensuring that proportion congruent effect occurred in the training phase is based on the real cognitive control rather than simple stimulus-response connection, found SC effect is domain-special, but proportion congruent effect are not occured in the post-training phase.