In our everyday environment we often have to focus on relevant information and adapt to changing task demands while ignoring distractions. A prime example of this is the sometimes effortful task of navigating through a website in search of relevant information while trying to ignore distractions presented at the same time that compete for our attention. We are interested in how people develop the ability to attend to relevant information in the presence of conflicting or distracting information. To do this we use so-called cognitive conflict tasks (e.g. the Simon and Stroop tasks). Moreover, we are particularly interested in whether similarities in task features (e.g. instructions, relevant information, type of distractions) across tasks play a role in how we deal with conflicting information and how improvements in one conflict task may transfer to another conflict task. To get a deeper insight into the different processes involved in cognitive conflict processing, we employ mouse-tracking in our online studies.
Keywords: Cognitive control; conflict tasks (Simon, Stroop); conflict adaptation; congruency sequence effect; mouse-tracking; Movement Dynamics; online experimentation.
Researchers involved: Theodora Hera Potamianou, Hannah Kaiser, Greta Thunhorst, Donna Bryce
Funded by: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (BR 6057/4-1). Subproject of the Research Unit 'Modal and amodal cognition: Functions and interactions' (FOR 2718)