Beyond conflict adaptation: Affectively experiencing and observing conflict enhance performance across conflict and non-conflict trials

Conflict processing typically elicits control adjustments, as expressed by the Conflict Adaptation Effect (CAE), which could be mediated by negative affect. Recent findings further suggest that the affective experience of conflict, even without responding, improves subsequent performance on both conflict and non-conflict trials, suggesting a broader enhancement of cognitive control. To clarify the mechanisms underlying this general benefit resulting from the affective experience of conflict, the present study conducted three behavioral experiments using a confound-minimized Stroop task. Experiment 1 compared a standard “Do-do” condition with an “Experience-do” condition, where participants experienced conflict at the affective level in a non-response phase first, before carrying out the Stroop task during a second one. Experiment 2 replaced “Experience-do” with a “Look-do” condition, where participants merely observed the Stroop stimulus first (without the need to experience it at the affective level), before completing the Stroop task. Experiment 3 introduced a “Judgement-do” condition, directing attention to a conflict-unrelated feature. We found that conflict elicited negative affect and a reliable CAE in all “Do-do” conditions. Crucially, both affective experience (Experiment 1) and mere observation (Experiment 2) of conflict produced general performance improvements extending from incongruent to congruent trials (i.e., a General Adaptation Effect – GAE), with a larger benefit in Experiment 1 than 2. This improvement disappeared when attention was directed to a conflict-unrelated feature (Experiment 3), suggesting that it is tied to conflict-related processing. These findings suggest that affectively experiencing or simply observing conflict is sufficient to enhance proactively a general form of cognitive control.