Cognitive control across multiple domains: semantic conflict, emotion, and dishonesty

Cognitive control refers to the ability to manage behaviors towards specific goals. This ability can involve overriding automatic/habitual responses and adapting to new information (Diamond, 2013). The present thesis investigates how cognitive control is modulated in different conflict contexts: Semantic, emotional, and conflict arising from dishonest responses. Our findings show that cognitive control – operationalized here as sequential modulation of interference – is activated during semantic interference and dishonest contexts, but not during emotional distractors. In the semantic context, we employed a Picture Word Interference task to study whether the repetition of superordinate categorical versus perceptual features affects cognitive control. Binding-retrieval accounts suggest that trial features that occur in the same time frame are bound together in an episodic representation. If a feature of episodic representation is repeated in the next trial, the previous control state is also reactivated (Frings et al., 2020). Our results showed that the effect of the sensory/perceptual repetition did not add to the repetition of the category, suggesting that only the superordinate category feature is involved in episodic representation here. In a dishonest context, we employed a Reaction Time Concealed Information Test. Participants were required to respond either truthfully or dishonestly to photos of previously seen and new items. We observed slower responses in dishonest conditions compared to honest ones, suggesting conflict monitoring (Foerster et al., 2023). The interference from dishonest responses decreased in trials following dishonest conditions compared to those following honest conditions. Contrary to semantic and dishonest contexts, a pattern of reduction of emotional interference was not observed. In conclusion, semantic and dishonest conflicts may activate cognitive stability, a cognitive control component for maintaining focus despite distractions (Egner, 2023) In our experiments, this pattern does not apply to emotional conflict that could be more related to attentional capture than to response conflict.