Inhibition And Renewal Of The Effects Of Independent Or Co-initiated Negative Compatibility Effects On Conflict Control

The negative compatibility effect (NCE) is a surprising phenomenon that subjects’responses to the target are slower (and more incorrect) when a target is preceded by a compatible subliminal prime and faster (and less incorrect) when the target is preceded by an incompatible subliminal prime. Three hypotheses have been put forward to explain the NCE:the self-inhibition account, the object updating account, and the combination of self-inhibition and object updating account. Many studies suggested that the NCE had an influence on the conflict control, but they only concerned with the NCE triggered by self-inhibition.In the present study, we designed three experiments combining masked prime paradigm and flanker paradigm, to examine how the NCE originated from the three different mechanisms mentioned above affect conflict control. Experiment 1 A used digital numerical stimuli "2" and "4" as prime and target, and stimuli "8" as mask, explored the relationship between the NCE triggered by self-inhibition and the Flanker effect. The results showed that the two effects had a significant interaction, the Flanker effect in incompatible condition was smaller than that in compatible condition. Experiment 1 B added another condition named neutral condition to explore the NCE triggered by self-inhibition effect the target or the flanker of the Flanker effect. The results showed that the masked prime inhibited the flanker in advance. Using digital numerical stimuli "1" and "3" as prime and target, with stimuli "8" as mask, Experiment 2 explored the relationship between the NCE triggered by object-updating and the Flanker effect. The results showed that the two effects had no interaction that the Flanker effect equal between compatible and incompatible conditions. Experiment 3 explored how the NCE triggered by both object-updating and self-inhibition and the NCE triggered by self-inhibition influence the Flanker effect. we used digital numerical stimuli "1", "2", "3"and "4" as prime and target, and stimuli "8" as mask. In addition, we manipulated two types of conflict conditions. One is stimulus conflict condition (target and flanker have different perceptual representations, but have same response code), reflecting early perceptual selection stage of conflict control. The other is taken response conflict condition (target and flanker have different perceptual representations and different response codes) used in experiment 1 and 2 as late response output stage of response conflict control. The results showed that the NCE triggered by self-inhibition had an interaction with the both two conflict control conditions. The reaction time in the stimulus conflict condition and the response conflict condition were equal to no conflict condition in incompatible treatment. NCE triggered by object-updating had no interaction with two conflict control conditions. However, the reaction time in the stimulus conflict condition was faster than that in response conflict condition and no conflict condition.The results of the present research suggested that:(1) The NCE triggered by self-inhibition influenced conflict control, characterized by inhibiting the followed stimulus which encoding the same response code as the masked prime in advance; (2) The NCE triggered by object-updating had no effect on conflict control; (3) The NCE triggered by both object-updating and self-inhibition could also influence conflict control process. This impact includes both inhibited the followed stimulus which encoded the same response code as the masked prime in advance, and activated the followed stimulus with perceptional encoding as same as the updated stimulus; (4) the NCE effect on conflict control not only occurs at the stage of feature encoding at the perceptual level, but also can reach the stage of action coding at the response level.