When can we and when do we adapt? Evidence that conflict adaptation can transcend contexts early in childhood.

*This manuscript is not yet published* Developing the ability to focus on relevant information and ignore irrelevant information is crucial for navigating an ever-changing environment. This skill, cognitive control, can be studied using conflict tasks in which the relevant and irrelevant information in a trial either align or compete (congruency). Performance in these tasks can be affected not only by the current trial’s congruency but also by the previous trial’s congruency. In adults, this conflict adaptation has been reported to occur between trials of the same task and different tasks. The goal of this study was to study the development and flexibility of cognitive control by assessing conflict adaptation across different age groups and contexts. Two groups of children (aged 6 and 9 years) and one group of adults processed adaptations of the Stroop and Simon tasks and the resulting mouse-tracking variables (total movement time, initiation time, maximum absolute deviation, changes of direction) were analysed. Across three experiments different context similarities were created depending on which tasks were combined. The results indicate that within-task conflict adaptation occurs in all age groups, and that some aspects of the unfolding response are increasingly affected by the current and previous trial’s congruency with age (namely, the deviation from a direct path to the correct response). Adults show less consistent across-task conflict adaptation effects as the paired tasks become more dissimilar, whereas data collected from children demonstrated conflict adaptation effects that transferred across tasks that were considered to be medium or low similarity. This represents a remarkable capacity for conflict adaptation early in development.