Is cognitive conflict really effortful? Conflict priming and shielding effects on cardiac response.

ABSTRACT: Two experiments with N = 221 university students investigated the impact of primed cognitive conflict on effort assessed as cardiac response in tasks that were not conflict-related themselves. Manifest cognitive conflict in cognitive control tasks is confounded with objective response difficulty (e.g., in incongruent Stroop task trials). This makes conclusions about the effortfulness of cognitive conflict itself difficult. We bypassed this problem by administrating pictures of congruent versus incongruent Stroop task stimuli as conflict primes. As predicted, primed cognitive conflict increased cardiac pre-ejection period (PEP) responses in an easy attention task in Experiment 1. Accordingly, cognitive conflict itself is indeed effortful. This effect was replicated in an easy short-term mem

SUBMITTER: Bouzidi YS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10078432 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature