Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Leopoldstr. 13, 80802, Munich, Germany,
Psychol Res. 2013 May;77(3):333-47. doi: 10.1007/s00426-012-0429-9. Epub 2012 Mar 6.
One important task of cognitive control is to regulate behavior by resolving information processing conflicts. In the Stroop task, e.g., incongruent trials lead to conflict-related enhancements of cognitive control and to improved behavioral performance in subsequent trials. Several studies suggested that these cognitive control processes are functionally and anatomically related to working memory (WM) functions. The present study investigated this suggestion and tested whether these control processes are modulated by concurrent WM demands. For this purpose, we performed three experiments in which we combined different WM tasks with the Stroop paradigm and measured their effects on cognitive control. We found that high WM demands led to a suppression of conflict-triggered cognitive control, whereas our findings suggest that this suppression effect is rather due to WM updating than to maintenance demands. We explain our findings by assuming that WM processes interfere with conflict-triggered cognitive control, harming the efficiency of these control processes.
认知控制的一个重要任务是通过解决信息处理冲突来调节行为。例如，在斯特鲁普任务中，不一致的试验导致与冲突相关的认知控制增强，并在随后的试验中提高行为表现。有几项研究表明，这些认知控制过程在功能和解剖上与工作记忆 (WM) 功能有关。本研究探讨了这一观点，并测试了这些控制过程是否受到并发 WM 需求的调节。为此，我们进行了三项实验，在这些实验中，我们将不同的 WM 任务与斯特鲁普范式结合起来，并测量它们对认知控制的影响。我们发现，高 WM 需求会导致冲突引发的认知控制受到抑制，而我们的研究结果表明，这种抑制效应更多地归因于 WM 更新，而不是维持需求。我们通过假设 WM 过程干扰冲突引发的认知控制，从而损害这些控制过程的效率来解释我们的发现。
