Phasic affective signals by themselves do not regulate cognitive control

ABSTRACT

Cognitive control is a set of mechanisms that help us process conflicting stimuli and maintain goal-relevant behaviour. According to the Affective Signalling Hypothesis, conflicting stimuli are aversive and thus elicit (negative) affect, moreover – to avoid aversive signals – affective and cognitive systems work together by increasing control and thus, drive conflict adaptation. Several studies have found that affective stimuli can indeed modulate conflict adaptation, however, there is currently no evidence that phasic affective states not triggered by conflict also trigger improved cognitive control. To investigate this possibility, we intermixed trials of a conflict task and trials involving the passive viewing of emotional words. We tested whether affective states induced by affective words in a given trial trigger improved cognitive control in a subsequent conflict trial. Applying Bayesian analysis, the results of four experiments supported the lack of adaptation to aversive signals, both in terms of valence and arousal. These results suggest that phasic affective states by themselves are not sufficient to elicit an increase in control.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognitive control
• affective signals
• conflict adaptation

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Zsuzsa Székely for her help in the data collection, Bence Pálfi for his insights in the statistical methodology, Matt Jaquiery for his help with the experiment script and Márton Kovács for his help with the analysis software. Last but not least we are grateful to the editor Dr. Andreas Eder and the two reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. Authors contributions: Balazs Aczel: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Supervision, Validation, and Writing – review & editing. Henk van Steenbergen: Supervision and Writing – review & editing. Mate Gyurkovics: Conceptualization, Supervision, Validation, and Writing – review & editing. Miklos Bognar: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Visualization, Writing – original draft, and Writing – review & editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This project [134918] has been implemented with the support provided by the Ministry of Innovation and Technology of Hungary from the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund, financed under the [FK_20] funding scheme.