doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00172 Is conflict adaptation an illusion?

effect Conflict adaptation theory is one of the most popular theo-ries in cognitive psychology. The theory argues that participants strategically modulate attention away from distracting stimulus features in response to conflict. This idea was particularly popu-larized with the publication of the conflict monitoring model of Botvinick et al. (2001). Although the conflict adaptation view is able to explain a wide range of results with a seemingly intuitive set of mechanisms, some researchers have expressed skepticism. The paradigms used in the study of conflict adaptation typi-cally require the manipulation of stimulus frequencies, sequential dependencies, time-on-task regularities, and various other task regularities that introduce the potential for learning of conflict-unrelated information (for a review, see Schmidt, 2013a). This raises the possibility that although the data patterns (e.g., reduce