Strategy and processing speed eclipse individual differences in control ability in conflict tasks

Hedge, Craig ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6145-3319, Powell, Georgina ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6793-0446, Bompas, Aline ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6957-2694 and Sumner, Petroc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0536-0510 2022. Strategy and processing speed eclipse individual differences in control ability in conflict tasks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 48 (10) , pp. 1448-1469. 10.1037/xlm0001028

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Abstract

Response control or inhibition is one of the cornerstones of modern cognitive psychology, featuring prominently in theories of executive functioning and impulsive behavior. However, repeated failures to observe correlations between commonly applied tasks have led some theorists to question whether common response conflict processes even exist. A challenge to answering this question is that behavior is multifaceted, with both conflict and nonconflict processes (e.g., strategy, processing speed) contributing to individual differences. Here, we use a cognitive model to dissociate these processes; the diffusion model for conflict tasks (Ulrich et al., 2015). In a meta-analysis of fits to seven empirical datasets containing combinations of the flanker, Simon, color-word Stroop, and spatial Stroop tasks, we observed weak (r < .05) zero-order correlations between tasks in parameters reflecting conflict processing, seemingly challenging a general control construct. However, our meta-analysis showed consistent positive correlations in parameters representing processing speed and strategy. We then use model simulations to evaluate whether correlations in behavioral costs are diagnostic of the presence or absence of common mechanisms of conflict processing. We use the model to impose known correlations for conflict mechanisms across tasks, and we compare the simulated behavior to simulations when there is no conflict correlation across tasks. We find that correlations in strategy and processing speed can produce behavioral correlations equal to, or larger than, those produced by correlated conflict mechanisms. We conclude that correlations between conflict tasks are only weakly informative about common conflict mechanisms if researchers do not control for strategy and processing speed.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC)
Additional Information:	This article has been published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3 .0/)
Publisher:	American Psychological Association
ISSN:	0278-7393
Funders:	Wellcome Trust
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	1 March 2021
Date of Acceptance:	24 February 2021
Last Modified:	04 Sep 2023 20:40
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/139120

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