Evans Nathan J, Servant Mathieu
School of Psychology.
Laboratoire de Recherches Integratives en Neurosciences et Psychologie Cognitive.
Psychol Rev. 2022 Oct;129(5):1183-1209. doi: 10.1037/rev0000357. Epub 2022 Apr 28.
Conflict tasks have become one of the most dominant paradigms within cognitive psychology, with their key finding being the conflict effect: That participants are slower and less accurate when task-irrelevant information conflicts with task-relevant information (i.e., incompatible trials), compared to when these sources of information are consistent (i.e., compatible trials). However, the conflict effect can consist of two separate effects: Facilitation effects, which is the amount of benefit provided by consistent task-irrelevant information, and interference effects, which is the amount of impairment caused by conflicting task-irrelevant information. While previous studies have attempted to disentangle these effects using neutral trials, which contrast compatible and incompatible trials to trials that are designed to have neutral task-irrelevant information, these analyses rely on the assumptions of Donder's subtractive method, which are difficult to verify and may be violated in some circumstances. Here, we develop a model-based approach for disentangling facilitation and interference effects, which extends the existing diffusion model for conflict tasks (DMC) framework to allow for different levels of automatic activation in compatible and incompatible trials. Comprehensive parameter recovery assessments display the robust measurement properties of our model-based approach, which we apply to nine previous data sets from the flanker (6) and Simon (3) tasks. Our findings suggest asymmetric facilitation and interference effects, where interference effects appear to be present for most participants across most studies, whereas facilitation effects appear to be small or nonexistent. We believe that our novel model-based approach provides an important step forward for understanding how information processing operates in conflict tasks, allowing researchers to assess the convergence or divergence between experimental-based (i.e., neutral trials) and model-based approaches when investigating facilitation and interference effects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
冲突任务已成为认知心理学中最主要的范式之一，其关键发现是冲突效应：与任务无关的信息与任务相关信息一致时（即兼容试验）相比，当任务无关信息与任务相关信息冲突时（即不兼容试验），参与者的反应速度会变慢且准确性会降低。然而，冲突效应可能由两种不同的效应组成：促进效应，即一致的任务无关信息所带来的益处；以及干扰效应，即冲突的任务无关信息所造成的损害。虽然先前的研究试图通过中性试验来区分这些效应，即将兼容和不兼容试验与设计为具有中性任务无关信息的试验进行对比，但这些分析依赖于唐德斯减法法的假设，这些假设难以验证，并且在某些情况下可能会被违反。在这里，我们开发了一种基于模型的方法来区分促进效应和干扰效应，该方法扩展了现有的冲突任务扩散模型（DMC）框架，以允许在兼容和不兼容试验中具有不同水平的自动激活。全面的参数恢复评估显示了我们基于模型的方法具有强大的测量属性，我们将其应用于之前来自侧翼任务（6个）和西蒙任务（3个）的九个数据集。我们的研究结果表明存在不对称的促进效应和干扰效应，在大多数研究中，大多数参与者似乎都存在干扰效应，而促进效应似乎很小或不存在。我们相信，我们新颖的基于模型的方法为理解信息处理在冲突任务中如何运作向前迈出了重要一步，使研究人员在研究促进效应和干扰效应时能够评估基于实验（即中性试验）和基于模型的方法之间的趋同或差异。（PsycInfo数据库记录（c）2022美国心理学会，保留所有权利）
