title: Is conflict adaptation due to active regulation or passive carry-over? Evidence from eye movements.
abstract: Conflict-adaptation effects (i.e., reduced response-time costs on high-conflict trials following high-conflict trials) supposedly represent our cognitive system's ability to regulate itself according to current processing demands. However, currently it is not clear whether these effects reflect conflict-triggered, active regulation, or passive carry-over of previous-trial control settings. We used eye movements to examine whether the degree of experienced conflict modulates conflict-adaptation effects, as the conflict-triggered regulation view predicts. Across 2 experiments in which participants had to identify a target stimulus based on an endogenous cue while-on conflict trials-having to resist a sudden-onset distractor, we found a clear indication of conflict adaptation. This adaptation effect disappeared however, when participants inadvertently fixated the sudden-onset distractor on the previous trial-that is, when they experienced a high degree of conflict. This pattern of results suggests that conflict adaptation can be explained parsimoniously in terms of a broader memory process that retains recently adopted control settings across trials. (PsycINFO Database Record
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Oregon.
authors.forename: Jason
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hubbard
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Oregon.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Kuhns
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Marburg University.
authors.forename: Theo A J
authors.initials: TA
authors.lastname: Schäfer
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Oregon.
authors.forename: Ulrich
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Mayr
mesh_terms: D000223:Adaptation, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003220:Conflict, Psychological; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology