Cognitive control is modality-specific

Cognitive control refers to the process by which individuals store, plan, and manipulate relevant information based on current task goals. The adaptability of cognitive control plays a crucial role in our ability to flexibly face upcoming events. When we are performing a task with a clear goal but are interfered by task-irrelevant information, our reaction becomes slower and more prone to errors. At this time, we need to invoke cognitive control to make goal-directed responses.

    Different types of conflicts require similar processes. Previous research has found that different types of conflict underlie different cognitive control mechanisms. For example, there is no conflict adaptation effect (CAE) between stimulus-stimulus conflicts and stimulus-response conflicts. Some studies have also found that there is no CAE between conflicts in different modalities, but they attributed this result to task switching between visual and auditory conflicts. So, is the separation of cognitive control across modalities due to different processing mechanisms or task switching?

    To address this question, we conducted a series of studies by eliminating interfering factors such as task switching. The experiment used two types of conflict tasks (stimulus-stimulus type and stimulus-response type) for cross-validation. Experiment 1 did not find any conflict adaptation across visual and auditory trials when the task was kept unchanged, supporting the hypothesis of modality specificity. However, results in this study may also be explained by that the two modalities differ in their feature dimensions. Therefore, in Experiment 2 we further investigated the influence of feature differences and set up two types of feature conflicts: position and orientation. The results showed that there was a conflict adaptation effect between features, indicating that feature differences were not the key factor causing the disappearance of conflict adaptation between modalities. Experiment 3 improved Experiment 1 and eliminated feature differences, replicating the results of Experiment 1.

 Fig.1 Experimental design 

 

Fig.2 Results 

    The three experiments together demonstrate that cognitive control is modality-specific. This also suggests that when studying higher cognitive processes, we need to consider the differences between different sensory channels and cannot directly use the processing mechanisms of one channel to explain those of another channel.

Citation: Yang, G., Nan, W., Zheng, Y., Wu, H., Li, Q., & Liu, X. (2017). Distinct cognitive control mechanisms as revealed by modality-specific conflict adaptation effects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 43(4), 807-818. doi:10.1037/xhp0000351.

 

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