title: Your conflict matters to me! Behavioral and neural manifestations of control adjustment after self-experienced and observed decision-conflict.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Amsterdam Center for the Study of Adaptive Control in Brain and Behavior, Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Jasper
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Winkel
authors.forename: Jasper G
authors.initials: JG
authors.lastname: Wijnen
authors.forename: K Richard
authors.initials: KR
authors.lastname: Ridderinkhof
authors.forename: Iris I A
authors.initials: II
authors.lastname: Groen
authors.forename: Jan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Derrfuss
authors.forename: Claudia
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Danielmeier
authors.forename: Birte U
authors.initials: BU
authors.lastname: Forstmann