Struggling Control in Unadaptable Scenario

Our cognitive control system is highly flexible, allowing us to quickly adapt to different situations as needed. While cognitive control is effective at resolving a continuous conflict task, it struggles when switching to a different conflict situation. Although this phenomenon has been widely reported, the brain's processing of this phenomenon is not well understood.

To investigate this issue, we conducted a spatial Stroop-Simon task, where participants were asked to respond left or right to an up or down arrow, respectively. The arrow could appear at the top, bottom, left, or right of the screen. When the arrow appeared at vertical locations, the location could be compatible or incompatible with the arrow orientation in terms of their semantic processing, leading to the spatial Stroop effects. When the arrow appeared at horizontal locations, the location could be compatible or incompatible with the response, leading to the Simon effects. Participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging during the task.



Figure 1. The experimental design and behavioral results.

We focused on the conflict adaptation (CA) effect, which refers to the smaller congruency effect after an incongruent trial than after a congruent trial. Our behavioral results showed that the CA effect occurred only when the consecutive trials were of the same conflict type, but not when the conflict type switched. This result suggested that cognitive control is conflict type specific.

But how does our brain process the conflict switching situation? Previous studies have reported that the Stroop and Simon conflicts underlie different brain regions, and explain the results as one conflict type cannot adjust control from another because they require different resources. However, this is only part of the story. A critical finding from the behavioral result is that when we switch from one conflict to another, our behavioral performance is not impaired, just not as adaptive as the conflict repetition condition. This suggests that the brain may compensate for the potential cost of conflict switching. So we investigated how the brain responds to this situation.

We found that the classic cognitive control regions, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex, were involved when we adjust from the same conflict condition, but these regions failed to adjust in conflict switching condition. Importantly, we found that a key region for the default mode network, the superior frontal gyrus (SFG), was highly involved during the conflict switching. Further analysis revealed that the SFG was inhibited more strongly when a conflict type switched. Since inhibition of the default mode network is usually helpful when doing a difficult task requiring stronger attention resources, our results suggest that we have to inhibit the default mode network to compensate for the challenging switching of conflict type situations.

Figure 2. fMRI results

We conclude that the unadaptable situation requires a completely different brain network from an adaptable situation.

Citation: Yang, G., Wang, K., Nan, W., Li, Q., Zheng, Y., Wu, H., & Liu, X. (2022). Distinct Brain Mechanisms for Conflict Adaptation within and across Conflict Types. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 34(3), 445-460. https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_01806.

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