title: EEG neural oscillatory dynamics reveal semantic and response conflict at difference levels of conflict awareness.
abstract: Although previous work has shown that conflict can be detected in the absence of awareness, it is unknown how different sources of conflict (i.e., semantic, response) are processed in the human brain and whether these processes are differently modulated by conflict awareness. To explore this issue, we extracted oscillatory power dynamics from electroencephalographic (EEG) data recorded while human participants performed a modified version of the Stroop task. Crucially, in this task conflict awareness was manipulated by masking a conflict-inducing color word preceding a color patch target. We isolated semantic from response conflict by introducing four color words/patches, of which two were matched to the same response. We observed that both semantic as well as response conflict were associated with mid-frontal theta-band and parietal alpha-band power modulations, irrespective of the level of conflict awareness (high vs. low), although awareness of conflict increased these conflict-related power dynamics. These results show that both semantic and response conflict can be processed in the human brain and suggest that the neural oscillatory mechanisms in EEG reflect mainly "domain general" conflict processing mechanisms, instead of conflict source specific effects.
authors.affiliation: 1] Department of Basic Psychology, School of Psychology, Third Military Medical University, Chongqing, China [2] Key laboratory of cognition and personality (Ministry of Education), and Faculty of psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, China [3] University of Amsterdam, Department of Psychology, the Netherlands.
authors.forename: Jun
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Jiang
authors.affiliation: Key laboratory of cognition and personality (Ministry of Education), and Faculty of psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, China.
authors.forename: Qinglin
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: 1] University of Amsterdam, Department of Psychology, the Netherlands [2] Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, the Netherlands.
authors.forename: Simon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Van Gaal
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001364:Awareness; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D003220:Conflict, Psychological; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012660:Semantics; D055815:Young Adult