Considering the Controlled Process: Incorporating Neutral Condition Findings Into Models of Cognitive Control

Models of conflict processing often times focus upon the test conditions in conflict tasks, resulting in a fixation on the automatic process.Though this framework is effective at accounting for reaction time (RT) differences at one time, the assumption it is based on appears to be difficult to justify theoretically.To provide an alternative to this account, we drew upon previous research done on the neutral condition and implemented it into two extensions of the Diffusion Model of Conflict.These extensions, the Decaying Accrual Diffusion Model of Conflict and the Biased Neutral Diffusion Model of Conflict, account for RT differences between the conditions by either altering the neutral drift curvature or applying a degree of automatic leakage into the controlled process's accumulation.Investigation into the expectations of both models shows that, for the Decaying Accrual Diffusion Model of Conflict, curvature alone cannot explain the differences observed in empirical data. However, the Biased Neutral Diffusion Model of Conflict can meet all requirements but has unresolved theoretical issues.