Poster #14 - The Development of Conflict Adaptation Within- and Across-Tasks: A Mouse-Tracking Study

• In Event: Poster Session 12

Abstract

Children’s ability to focus on relevant information and ignore irrelevant information is crucial for navigating an ever-changing environment and taking control of their own learning. This skill, named inhibitory or cognitive control, is often studied using so-called conflict tasks (e.g the classic Stroop or Simon tasks) in which the relevant and irrelevant information in a trial either align or compete giving rise to congruent and incongruent conditions respectively. Differences in performance between these two conditions, the congruency effect, is considered a marker of cognitive control. Interestingly, it has been observed that conflict processing is not only affected by the current trial’s, but also the previous trial’s congruency. That is, the congruency effect is reduced following incongruent trials. That such conflict adaptation effects have been observed in even young children (Ambrosi et al. 2016) indicates that some sort of preparation for an upcoming task occurs (i.e. that proactive control is engaged). In adults, it has also been observed that conflict adaptation can occur across trials of different tasks, although findings of such across-task conflict adaptation are mixed. In this study, we examined the development of conflict adaptation effects within- and across-tasks. To gain more insight into conflict processing as it unfolds, we additionally collected mouse-tracking data and analysed different markers of response dynamics.

Two groups of children, aged 7 and 10 years, and one group of adults (n=30 in each group) participated in an online mouse-tracking study. Child-friendly versions of the Stroop and Simon tasks were presented in different contexts. In single task blocks, participants completed multiple trials of the same task; in mixed blocks, Stroop and Simon trials were presented in alternating fashion. Within each trial the following dependent variables were measured: accuracy, response time (time between stimulus presentation and response), initiation time (time taken to initiate the mouse movement) and maximum absolute deviation (MAD; deviation from the direct line between starting point and response). Within- and across-task conflict adaptation effects were calculated from the different block types. Data were log-transformed to account for differences in speed of processing and analysed as a function of Age Group and Type of Conflict Adaptation (within- or across-task). Based on prior research (Erb & Marcovitch, 2019), we anticipated significant within-task conflict adaptation in each age group which would decrease with age. We had no strong hypotheses regarding developmental effects on across-task conflict adaptation, but did expect that any effects would provide insights into the representational formats involved in cognitive control processes.

We observed significant within-task conflict adaptation effects in each age group in the MAD measure, but across-task conflict adaptation effects only reached significance in adults (also in MAD). Additionally, while the degree of within-task conflict adaptation did not change with age, the degree of across-task conflict adaptation increased with age (for MAD). This can be interpreted as showing that conflict experienced in a prior different task influences response selection processes increasingly with age, and as evidence that more abstract, task-general representations of cognitive conflict only emerge later in development.

Authors

• Theodora-Hera Potamianou
  Presenting Author

• Donna Bryce, University of Tübingen