Institute of Brain and Psychological Sciences, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu, China.
Institute of Brain and Psychological Sciences, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu, China.
Neurobiol Learn Mem. 2022 Sep;193:107654. doi: 10.1016/j.nlm.2022.107654. Epub 2022 Jun 28.
Conflict adaptation refers to the dynamic modulation of conflict processing across successive trials and reflects improved cognitive control. Interestingly, aversive motivation can increase conflict adaptation, although it remains unclear through which process this modulation occurs because previous studies presented punishment feedback following suboptimal performance on both congruent and incongruent trials. According to integrative accounts of conflict monitoring and aversive motivation in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, punishment feedback following slow or erroneous performance on incongruent trials in particular should lead to improved conflict adaptation. Second, selectively increasing motivation on incongruent trials should reduce the overall congruency effect. The current study sought to test both hypotheses. Specifically, we administered the confound-minimized Stroop task to a large group of participants and manipulated the position of feedback (following either congruent or incongruent trials) and aversive motivation (tied to a monetary loss or not) across different blocks. As expected, the congruency effect was found to be smaller when punishment was coupled with incongruent versus congruent trials. However, results showed that conflict adaptation was increased when punishment feedback was selectively coupled with congruent rather than incongruent trials. Together, these results suggest that aversive motivation does not uniformly improve cognitive control but this gain appears to be context dependent.
冲突适应是指在连续的试验中对冲突处理的动态调节，反映了认知控制的改善。有趣的是，厌恶动机可以增加冲突适应，尽管目前尚不清楚这种调节是通过什么过程发生的，因为之前的研究在相容和不相容试验中都在次优表现后呈现了惩罚反馈。根据背侧前扣带皮层中冲突监测和厌恶动机的综合解释，特别是在不相容试验中，由于缓慢或错误的表现而呈现惩罚反馈，应该会导致冲突适应的改善。其次，选择性地增加不相容试验的动机应该会减少整体一致性效应。本研究旨在检验这两个假设。具体来说，我们对一大群参与者进行了混淆最小化的 Stroop 任务，并在不同的块中改变了反馈的位置（跟随相容或不相容试验）和厌恶动机（与金钱损失相关或不相关）。正如预期的那样，当惩罚与不相容试验而不是相容试验结合时，一致性效应较小。然而，结果表明，当惩罚反馈选择性地与相容试验而不是不相容试验结合时，冲突适应会增加。总的来说，这些结果表明，厌恶动机并不会统一地改善认知控制，而是这种收益似乎是依赖于情境的。
