Your conflict matters to me! Behavioral and neural manifestations of control adjustment after self-experienced and observed decision-conflict.
In everyday life we tune our behavior to a rapidly changing environment as well as to the behavior of others. The behavioral and neural underpinnings of such adaptive mechanisms are the focus of the present study. In a social version of a prototypical interference task we investigated whether trial-to-trial adjustments are comparable when experiencing conflicting action tendencies ourselves, or simulate such conflicts when observing another player performing the task. Using behavioral and neural measures by means of event-related brain potentials we showed that both own as well as observed conflict result in comparable trial-to-trial adjustments. These adjustments are found in the efficiency of behavioral adjustments, and in the amplitude of an event-related potential in the N2 time window. In sum, in both behavioral and neural terms, we adapt to conflicts happening to others just as if they happened to ourselves.
Winkel
Jasper
J
Amsterdam Center for the Study of Adaptive Control in Brain and Behavior, Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Wijnen
Jasper G
JG
Ridderinkhof
K Richard
KR
Groen
Iris I A
II
Derrfuss
Jan
J
Danielmeier
Claudia
C
Forstmann
Birte U
BU