Schedule of Events | Symposia

A Model of the Temporal Dynamics of Automatic and Goal-Directed Processing during Conflict Resolution

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Jacob Sellers¹ (jacobsel@umich.edu), Han Zhang¹, John Jonides¹, Taraz Lee¹; ¹University of Michigan

Cognitive control allows us to overcome habitual and automatic processing to enable goal-directed behavior. Doing so is an inherently time dependent process, as control needs time to overcome the influence of faster, automatic processing. However, most research on conflict resolution processes measures free response times (RTs), which index only the time it takes to fully resolve conflict. This approach makes it difficult to disentangle how the contributions of automatic and goal-directed processing evolve over time to produce behavior. To overcome this limitation, the forced-response method can be employed. This method allows one to trace out the time course of conflict resolution processes by forcing people to respond at predetermined times, turning RT into an independent variable. This approach allows for the direct measure of habitual responses that are rarely observed in free RT tasks. Here, we apply a new response preparation model (RPM) to data from forced-response conflict tasks to disentangle the component processes of cognitive control. This model independently estimates how long it takes to prepare habitual and goal-directed responses. We show that conceptualizing the conflict resolution process in terms of the underlying competing responses can account for congruency effects in the Simon and flanker tasks. We also demonstrate that the RPM can model control adjustments that take place over long and short timescales (e.g., the proportion congruency effect and the congruency sequence effect). These results suggest that the RPM may be fruitful for examining cognitive control adjustments that regulate the competition between automatic and goal-directed processes.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Monitoring & inhibitory control