Conflict monitoring theory [M.M. Botvinick, T. Braver, D. Barch, C. Carter, J.D. Cohen, Conflict monitoring and cognitive control, Psychol. Rev. 108 (2001) 625-652] assumes that perceptual ambiguity among choice stimuli elicits response conflict in choice reaction. It hence predicts that response conflict is also involved in elementary variants of choice reaction time (RT) tasks, i.e., those va...

Fulfillment of the basic psychological needs for competence, relatedness, and autonomy is believed to facilitate people's integrative tendencies to process psychological conflicts and develop a coherent sense of self. The present study therefore used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the relation between need fulfillment and the amplitude of conflict negativity (CN), a neurophysiologic...

Distinct patterns of activity within the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) reported in neuroimaging studies during tasks involving conflict between competing responses have often been cited as evidence for their key contributions to conflict-monitoring and behavioral adaptation, respectively. However, supporting evidence from neuropsychological patients ...

Most experimental studies of decision-making have specifically examined situations in which a single correct answer exists (externally guided decision-making). Along with such externally guided decision-making, there are instances of decision-making in which no correct answer based on external circumstances is available for the subject (internally guided decision-making, e.g. preference judgmen...

HIGHLIGHTS The conflict monitoring hypothesis signals the need for cognitive controlThe Gratton effect is a key result attributed to the conflict monitoring hypothesisSome argue that controlling binding confounds eliminates the Gratton effect A Gratton effect remains in a vocal Stroop task after eliminating confounds The Gratton effect, the observation that the size of the Stroop effect is larg...

OBJECTIVE There is abundance of literature on adverse effects of conflict on the health of the population. In contrast to this, sporadic data in Nepal claim improvements in most of the health indicators during the decade-long armed conflict (1996-2006). However, systematic information to support or reject this claim is scant. This study reviews Nepal's key health indicators before and after the...

On many measures of ethno-linguistic diversity, Papua New Guinea is the most fragmented society in the world. I argue that the macro-level political effect of this diversity has been to reduce, rather than increase, the impact of ethnic conflict on the state. Outside the Bougainville conflict, and (to a lesser extent) the recent upsurge of violence in the Southern Highlands, ethnic conflicts in...

When two different images are presented to the two eyes, the percept will alternate between the images (a phenomenon called binocular rivalry). In the present study, we investigate the degree to which such interocular conflict is conspicuous. By using a visual search task, we show that search for interocular conflict is near efficient (15 ms/item) and can lead to a search asymmetry, depending o...

In this paper, the automatic detection of conflict in audiovisual recordings of political debates is addressed. In contrast to the current state of the art in social signal processing, where only the audio modality is employed for analysing the human non-verbal behavior, we propose to use additionally visual features capturing certain facial behavioral cues such as head nodding, fidgeting and f...