Cognitive Interference and control adjustments in speeded reaction time tasks

In many of our everyday life situations we are confronted with conflicting information that can lead to incorrect behaviour. Current cognitive models propose a conflict monitoring system that detects ongoing conflicts and errors and adjusts performance accordingly. For example, after having submitted the wrong pin number to the cash machine and received an error message instead of the expected cash, we will be more careful and slower in our second attempt. Experimental psychologists have studied this phenomenon using very simple choice reaction time tasks. Recent evidence (Jentzsch & Leuthold, JEP:HPP, 2005) has revealed that residual activation left from processing of previous events in a sequence of continuously presented events can result in conflicts and subsequent performance adjustments. The present project further investigates such sequence-related conflicts. Eleven reaction time experiments will explore the response-related nature of sequence-related conflict effect (experiments 1 to 3), the effectiveness of the conflict monitor (experiments 4 to 6), the processing stages affected by control adjustment (experiments 7 to 8) and the temporal dynamics of conflict control (experiments 9 to 11). Together, these experiments promise to provide novel findings that will allow further specification and development of theoretical models of cognitive control.