Unconscious conflicts in unconscious contexts: the role of awareness and timing in flexible conflict adaptation.

Humans adapt to context-specific frequencies of response conflicts. Typically, the impact of conflict-inducing information is reduced in contexts with high compared to low frequency of conflict. We investigated how such context-specific conflict adaptation depends on awareness and timing of conflict-eliciting stimuli and conflict-signaling contexts. In a priming paradigm, we varied the visibility of the prime and whether the context is a feature of either prime or target. Concretely, the context was represented by the format of either prime (Experiment 1) or target (Experiment 2), which means that primes or targets of a particular format were associated with a high or low probability of conflict (i.e., prime-target incongruency). In both experiments, we found a context-specific modulation of congruency effects, both with masked and visible primes. To control for mechanisms of event learning in Experiments 3 and 4, context-specific conflict frequency was realized by inducing trials, while stimuli in test trials were associated with equal conflict frequency. We again found a context-specific congruency modulation when the prime represented the context, most interestingly also with masked primes within test trials. When the target represented the context, however, such a modulation occurred with visible primes, but not with masked primes. These results provide a compelling case for the unconscious exertion of a very flexible form of cognitive control. Context-specific conflict adaptation processes can basically operate independently of both conflict awareness and context awareness, but they depend on close temporal proximity of context and conflict information. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.