Geneva Motivation Lab, FPSE, Section of Psychology, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Psychophysiology. 2023 Feb;60(2):e14169. doi: 10.1111/psyp.14169. Epub 2022 Sep 8.
Two experiments with N = 221 university students investigated the impact of primed cognitive conflict on effort assessed as cardiac response in tasks that were not conflict-related themselves. Manifest cognitive conflict in cognitive control tasks is confounded with objective response difficulty (e.g., in incongruent Stroop task trials). This makes conclusions about the effortfulness of cognitive conflict itself difficult. We bypassed this problem by administrating pictures of congruent versus incongruent Stroop task stimuli as conflict primes. As predicted, primed cognitive conflict increased cardiac pre-ejection period (PEP) responses in an easy attention task in Experiment 1. Accordingly, cognitive conflict itself is indeed effortful. This effect was replicated in an easy short-term memory task in Experiment 2. Moreover, as further predicted, the primed cognitive conflict effect on PEP reactivity disappeared when participants could personally choose task characteristics. This latter effect corresponds to other recent evidence showing that personal action choice shields against incidental affective influences on action execution and especially on effort-related cardiovascular response.
两项实验共招募了 221 名大学生，旨在研究认知冲突引发的认知加工对心搏反应的影响，而这些心搏反应本身与冲突无关。在认知控制任务中，明显的认知冲突与客观反应难度（如不一致的 Stroop 任务试验）混淆在一起。这使得关于认知冲突本身费力程度的结论变得困难。我们通过给予一致和不一致 Stroop 任务刺激的图片作为认知冲突的启动来解决这个问题。正如预测的那样，在实验 1 中，启动的认知冲突增加了简单注意任务的射血前期（PEP）反应。因此，认知冲突本身确实很费力。在实验 2 中的简单短期记忆任务中，这一效应得到了复制。此外，正如进一步预测的那样，当参与者可以亲自选择任务特征时，认知冲突对 PEP 反应性的影响就会消失。这后一种效应与其他最近的证据一致，表明个人行动选择可以防止对行动执行的偶然情感影响，尤其是对与努力相关的心血管反应的影响。
