Date created: 2025-02-20 03:18 PM | Last Updated: 2025-02-26 04:25 PM

Category: Project

Description: Cognitive conflict is a frequent aspect of our daily life, yet its underlying neural mechanisms remain debated. Competing theories propose that conflict processing is governed by a domain-general system, multiple conflict-specific modules, or both types of systems, as evidence by hybrid accounts. To investigate this, we analysed electroencephalogram (EEG) data from 507 participants (ages 20–70) who completed three conflict tasks: change detection, Simon, and Stroop tasks. A novel decoding approach was adopted to distinguish between conflict versus non-conflict trials. While within-task decoding showed robust effects, decoding across tasks showed chance-level evidence. These findings support the idea that conflict processing relies on multiple conflict specific modules tailored to task-specific demands. By leveraging a large, diverse sample and data-driven analysis, this study provides compelling evidence for conflict-specific neural mechanisms, offering new insights into the nature of cognitive control.