Many psychologists and neuroscientists still see executive functions as independent, domain-general, supervisory functions that are often dissociated from more “low-level” associative learning. Here, we suggest that executive functions very much build on associative learning, and argue that executive functions might be better understood as culture-sensitive cognitive gadgets, rather than as ready-made cognitive instincts.

Researchers have recently begun to question the specificity and reliability of conflict adaptation effects, also known as sequential congruency effects, a highly cited effect in cognitive psychology. Some have even used the lack of reliability across tasks to argue against models of cognitive control that have dominated the field for decades. The present study tested the possibility that domain-general processes across tasks might appear on more sensitive mouse-tracking metrics rather than overall reaction times. The relationship between SCE effects on the (...) Stroop and Flanker tasks were examined for the first time using a mouse-tracking paradigm. Three main findings emerged: Robust SCEs were observed for both the Stroop and Flanker tasks at the group level, Within-task split-half reliabilities for the SCE across dependent variables were weak at best and non-existent in many cases, and SCEs for the Flanker and Stroop tasks did not correlate with each other for overall reaction times, but did show significant correlations between tasks on more dynamic measures that captured processes before response execution. These findings contribute to the literature by highlighting how mouse-tracking may be a fruitful avenue by which future studies can examine the specificity and reliability of conflict adaptation and tease apart different theoretical models producing the effects. (shrink)

ABSTRACTNegative emotion influences cognitive control, and more specifically conflict adaptation. However, discrepant results have often been reported in the literature. In this study, we broke down negative emotion into integral and incidental components using a modern motivation-based framework, and assessed whether the former could change conflict adaptation. In the first experiment, we manipulated the duration of the inter-trial-interval to assess the actual time-scale of this effect. Integral negative emotion was induced by using loss-related feedback contingent on task performance, and measured (...) at the subjective and physiological levels. Results showed that conflict-driven adaptive control was enhanced when integral negative emotion was elicited, compared to a control condition without changes in defensive motivation. Importantly, this effect was only found when a short, as opposed to long ITI was used, suggesting that it had a short time scale. In the second experiment, we controlled for effe... (shrink)

It is easy to think of attention as a purely sensorimotor, exogenous mechanism divorced from the influence of an agent’s preferences and needs. However, according to the active inference framework, such a strict reduction cannot be straightforwardly invoked, since _all_ cognitive and behavioural processes can at least be described as maximising the evidence for a generative model entailed by the ongoing existence of that agent; that is, the minimisation of variational free energy. As such, active inference models could cast an (...) (embodied) cognitive mechanism like attention, described in this paper as a relevance filter, as constrained (or enslaved) by these prior preferences for which an agent must seek evidence, whether or not such priors are having direct, real-time neurocognitive effects on the sensorimotor loops that couple the attending agent and her surrounding environment. This duality with respect to the role of priors corresponds to a wider, ongoing debate in the active inference community regarding the framework’s explanatory power. More specifically, the debate centres on whether the notion of a generative model and the priors embedded ubiqitously therein act as a purely useful instrumental tool for scientists aiming to model the behaviours of self-organising entities, or, rather, the brain (and body) is genuinely constituted by a predictive hierarchy within which higher-order dynamics constrain and contextualise activity unfolding at lower levels. With a focus on the second (ontologically realist) construal of active inference presented here, this paper argues that in cognitive systems endowed with attentional schema, higher-order preferences do, indeed, impose a demonstrable and powerful modulating effect on the way attention unfolds. Furthermore, these preferences in question transcend the contingent, task-relevant goals that have already been shown to bias attention. Rather, attention is powerfully tuned by the most-deep rooted priors the agent possesses, such that, when sensory evidence against these priors is observed and free energy spikes, the agent attentionally prioritises the homeostatic restoration of these preferred states over their shorter-term desires. This suggests that, at its core, attention is a goal-driven process, which calls into question the putative dichotomy that exists between endogenous (goal-directed) attention and exogenous (stimulus-driven) attention. What emerges in its place is a symbiotic relationship between attention and preferences, whereby the fulfilment of the latter rests on successful application of the former, and the former derives its function from the organismic need to find evidence for the latter. (shrink)

The present study investigated the influence of emotional stimuli in the flanker task. In six experiments, separate influences of anticipating and reacting to valence-laden stimuli (affective pictures or facial expressions) on the flanker effect and its sequential modulation (also known as conflict adaptation) were examined. The results showed that there was little evidence that emotional stimuli influenced cognitive control when positive and negative stimuli appeared randomly during the flanker task. When positive and negative stimuli were separated between different participant groups (...) in order to exclude a possible contamination from the effect of one valence to that of another, the sequential modulation was reduced when valence-laden stimuli were anticipated or had been presented on a preceding trial, regardless of the valence of the stimuli. A similar pattern was also obtained with facial expressions but only for response accuracy and only after valence-laden stimuli were presented on a preceding trial. The influences of anticipating and reacting to emotional stimuli were only partially replicated in the final two experiments where the arousal and valence of affective pictures were manipulated orthogonally. The lack of consistent influences of emotional stimuli on the flanker effect challenges the existing theories that implicate affective contributions to cognitive control. (shrink)