The Observing to Conflict Occurrence Can Induce the Conflict Adaptation

Abstract

The conflict-driven adaptation in performance has been well documented in the color-word naming Stroop task. The present study included three experiments using the color-word Stroop tasks to investigate how the response execution and the conflict observation affected the conflict adaptation effect. In the three experiments, 'D', 'F', 'J', and 'K' keys were pressed when the color of the Chinese characters were RED, GREEN, YELLOW, and BLUE, respectively. In Experiment 1, twenty-seven healthy undergraduates were tested with a color-word Stroop task. All trials began with a fixation presented for 500 ms, followed by a blank interval of 300∼500 ms (500∼800 ms for Experiments 2 and 3) randomly. In Experiment 2, twenty-nine healthy undergraduates were tested with choice reaction time (RT) task and color-word Stroop task. task. In Experiment 3, twenty-six healthy undergraduates were tested using the similar task with Experiment 1; however participants did not need to execute response in the previous trials. The present results suggest that the conflict adaptation effect was distorted by the response execution of the previous trials. To obtain pure conflict adaptation effect, it is necessary to exclude response execution in the previous trials. Thus, the observation of conflict favors the presence of the conflict adaptation effect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)