Open AccessAre cognitive control processes reliable?
Author(s) -
Peter S. Whitehead,
Gene A. Brewer,
Chris Blais
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal of experimental psychology. learning, memory, and cognition
Language(s) - Uncategorized
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.758
H-Index - 156
eISSN - 1939-1285
pISSN - 0278-7393
DOI - 10.1037/xlm0000632
Subject(s) - stroop effect , mechanism (biology) , psycinfo , psychology , cognitive psychology , cognition , error related negativity , control (management) , anterior cingulate cortex , dorsolateral prefrontal cortex , prefrontal cortex , computer science , neuroscience , artificial intelligence , medline , philosophy , epistemology , political science , law
Recent work on cognitive control focuses on the conflict-monitoring hypothesis , which posits that a performance monitoring mechanism recruits regions in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to ensure that goal-directed behavior is optimal. Critical to this theory is that a single performance monitoring mechanism explains a large number of behavioral effects including the sequential congruency effect (SCE) and the error-related slowing (ERS) effect. This leads to the prediction that the size of these effects should correlate across cognitive control tasks. To this end, we conducted three large-scale individual differences experiments to examine whether the SCE and ERS effect are correlated across Simon, Flanker, and Stroop tasks. Across all experiments, the results revealed a correlation for the error-related slowing effect, but not for the sequential congruency effect across tasks. We discuss the implications of these results in regards to the hypothesis that a domain-general performance monitoring mechanism drives both effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).