Exploration Of The Generality Of Conflict Adaptation Based On Cognitive Tasks And Stereotypic Tasks:A ERP Study

Subjects can easilier resolve the current conflict after experiencing the previous conflict in the compatible task,which is termed conflict adaptation effect.People always wish conflict adaptation learned from one conflict situation can apply to various conflict situations.Then is conflict adaptation domain-general or domain-specific? Recently there were not a few researches on the generality of conflict adaptation,but those were restricted to relatively neutral stimuli(letters,numbers,colors,arrows)and the tasks did not directly relate to participants' needs and motivations outside the laboratory.One possible limitation of such tasks is that they may yield an underestimation of the potential for conflict adaptation.Some researches suggest that the social significance of the task(which is related to the needs and motivation of subjects)may modulate the generality of conflict adaptation.It provides a new direction for research on the generality of conflict adaptation——we can introduce social factors to explore the generality of conflict adaptation.Therefore the current research designed two experiments combined with event-related potential(ERP)in order to explore generality of conflict adaptation between cognitive tasks and stereotypic tasks.Previous researches have indicated that task-switching design can generate switching costs,which interfere with conflict adaptation,so we adopted stimulus-switching design and factorial task-crossing design.Besides a multilevel simuli set was used to get rid of feature integration and contingency learning.Experiment 1 adopted stimulus-switching design combining a face-word cognitive Stroop task with a stereotypic Stroop task;results showed that there was significant conflict adaptation on central prefrontal SP amplitude from a cognitive Stroop task to a stereotypic Stroop task,while there was significant conflict adaptation only on accuracy but not on SP amplitude from a stereotypic Stroop task to a cognitive Stroop task.It implied conflict adaptation was domain-general.However,conflict types of a Stroop task and a stereotypic Stroop task were actually identical(conflicts were both from relative stimulus dimension and irrelative stimulus dimension).Experiment 2 adopted factorial task-crossing design combining a Simon task with a gender stereotypic prime–target task(conflict in Simon task was from relative response dimension and irrelative stimulus dimension,while conflict in stereotypic prime–target task was from relative stimulus dimension and irrelative stimulus dimension).Experiment 2 results exhibited that there was significant conflictadaptation on RT,accuracy,parietal-occipital N450,frontal-parietal SP and central prefrontal SP amplitude within Simon tasks and on parietal-occipital N450 and central prefrontal SP amplitude within stereotypic tasks;conflict adaptation was significant on parietal-occipital N450 and central prefrontal SP amplitude from a Simon task to a stereotypic task;while conflict adaptation was not significant on parietal-occipital N450 and central prefrontal SP amplitude from a stereotypic task to a Simon task.Taken together,we concluded:1.From a cognitive task to a stereotypic task,conflict adaptation is domain general.2.From a stereotypic task to a cognitive task,conflict adaptation is domain specific.3.The social significance of the task may modulate the generality of conflict adaptation,which only occurs in one direction from a cognitive task to a stereotypic task.4.Cognitive control plays a significant modulatory role in the exepression of stereotype.