Response conflict and fluency of processing as affective signals for control adaptation

Response conflict has been a frequent topic of research for the last two decades. Behavioral adaptations to conflicts have often been replicated and reported and yet the theoretical debate about their origin is still going on. While some claim that the underlying mechanism of characteristic response patterns is adjustment of cognitive control, others argue that the effects that are typically found in standard conflict paradigms, such as the Stroop-, Simon-, or Eriksen-Flanker-Task, are entirely caused by contingencies and repetitions that are caused by the way the task is presented. There are several hints towards an affective-motivational component of control adaptations which go way beyond basic processes such as contingency learning and repetition priming. Research presented in this dissertation suggests a theoretical account of conflicts as aversive disfluency signals, which set control processes in motion. First of all, the often unattended question about the role of congruent trials in typical response conflict paradigms is asked in Study I. A typical paradigm is extended by a neutral reference condition, so that an objective comparison of the contribution of congruent and incongruent trials to the typical behavioral pattern is possible. As this study demonstrates, adaptation occurs not only after incongruent trials, i.e. conflict, but also after congruent trials. Therefore, the affective characteristics of the stimuli in an ongoing response conflict paradigm and their relation to behavioral patterns are investigated. To this end, online measurements of the activity of two facial muscles indicating emotional responses are achieved in Study II using electromyography. This study shows that indeed, by tendency, incongruent trials elicit rather negative responses and congruent trials elicit positive responses. The strength of muscular activation was furthermore correlated with the strength of behavioral adaptation, pointing towards a process of affectively motivated control adjustments. In Study III, a mechanism of contextual rather than sequential control adjustment is the subject of research. Former studies have shown that cognitive control can be flexibly adjusted in a context-specific way depending on perceptual context features, such as stimulus location or social features, such as gender identity of a facial stimulus. The auditory stimuli that were used in the tasks, which are part of Study III, vary in control requirements depending on the voice identity of the speaker. Although context specific control adaptation could not be clearly observed, there are strong hints towards an adaptive mechanism that adjusts attentional control in dependence of the current context. The investigation of an auditory and ecologically graspable context feature like voice identity is relevant and new, and Study III is therefore a door-opener for further scientific investigations. Results of all three studies corroborate the notion of an affective-motivational mechanism underlying sequential as well as context-specific adaptation of cognitive control. While response conflict is not the only and probably by far not the most frequent event calling for control adaptation, the existing account of conflicts as aversive signals for control adaptation is developed into an account of fluency monitoring. It is supposed that more and less fluent events in our environment cause flexible up- and downregulation along a continuum of control in the service of affect regulation. These are valuable insights insofar that they can be used as a theoretical basis for future experimental research. Potential fields of application like marketing and product development can benefit from and build on the theoretical foundation provided by cognitive psychology that is corroborated and updated here