Comparing the Neural Correlates of Conscious and Unconscious Conflict Control in a Masked Stroop Priming Task
نویسندگان
چکیده
Although previous studies have suggested that conflict control can occur in the absence of consciousness, the brain mechanisms underlying unconscious and conscious conflict control remain unclear. The current study used a rapid event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging design to collect data from 24 participants while they performed a masked Stroop priming task under both conscious and unconscious conditions. The results revealed that the fronto-parietal conflict network, including medial frontal cortex (MFC), left and right dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and posterior parietal cortex (PPC), was activated by both conscious and unconscious Stroop priming, even though in MFC and left DLPFC the activations elicited by unconscious Stroop priming were smaller than conscious Stroop priming. The findings provide evidence for the existence of quantitative differences between the neural substrates of conscious and unconscious conflict control.
منابع مشابه
Comparing Conscious and Unconscious Conflict Adaptation
Recently, researchers have been trying to unravel the function of consciousness by exploring whether unconscious information is (in)capable of exerting cognitive control. Theoretically, cognitive control functions, such as conflict adaptation, have often been assumed to require consciousness. However, empirical evidence on conscious versus unconscious conflict adaptation is highly contradictory...
متن کاملUnconscious vision and executive control: how unconscious processing and conscious action control interact.
Research on unconscious or unaware vision has demonstrated that unconscious processing can be flexibly adapted to the current goals of human agents. The present review focuses on one area of research, masked visual priming. This method uses visual stimuli presented in a temporal sequence to lower the visibility of one of these stimuli. In this way, a stimulus can be masked and even rendered inv...
متن کاملUnconsciously Triggered Conflict Adaptation
In conflict tasks such as the Stroop, the Eriksen flanker or the Simon task, it is generally observed that the detection of conflict in the current trial reduces the impact of conflicting information in the subsequent trial; a phenomenon termed conflict adaptation. This higher-order cognitive control function has been assumed to be restricted to cases where conflict is experienced consciously. ...
متن کاملDisentangling conscious and unconscious processing: a subjective trial-based assessment approach
The most common method for assessing similarities and differences between conscious and unconscious processing is to compare the effects of unconscious (perceptually weak) stimuli, with conscious (perceptually strong) stimuli. Awareness of these stimuli is then assessed by objective performance on prime identification tasks. While this approach has proven extremely fruitful in furthering our un...
متن کاملNeural Correlates of Subliminal Language Processing
Language is a high-level cognitive function, so exploring the neural correlates of unconscious language processing is essential for understanding the limits of unconscious processing in general. The results of several functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have suggested that unconscious lexical and semantic processing is confined to the posterior temporal lobe, without involvement of th...
متن کامل