Psychological Development and Education ›› 2017, Vol. 33 ›› Issue (5): 569-576.doi: 10.16187/j.cnki.issn1001-4918.2017.05.07

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The Influence of Cognitive Aging on Conflict Adaptation under Different Task Difficulties

SONG Xiaolei, LI Xiaofang, ZHAO Yuan, HE Dan   

  1. School of Psychology, Shaanxi Normal University;Shaanxi Key Laboratory of Behavior and Cognitive Neuroscience, Xi'an 710062
  • Online:2017-09-15 Published:2017-09-15

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Abstract: The ability of conflict adaptation reflected not only the ability of conflict monitoring, but also the ability of modulating top-down cognitive control based on conflict situations. The paradigm of task conflictions was adopted in two experiments to explore how the conflict adaptation was influenced by aging problem. Experiment 1 used the classical Flanker task to explore whether the conflict adaptation effect would emerge in both the younger and older adults, and if the conflict adaptation effect was different between them. Experiment 2 integrated the Simon and Flanker conflicts together to examine whether there were some differences between them after increasing the difficulty level. Results indicated that cognitive aging have no influence on conflict adaptation in low difficulty condition, however, when the difficulties of conflict task increased, cognitive resources that older adults recruited from other brain areas can't ever compensate for the damage caused by cognitive aging. Our conclusion is that the influence of cognitive aging on conflict adaptation ability is mainly appeared in high difficulty tasks, which supported compensation theory as well as limited cognitive resources theories.

Key words: flanker conflict, simon conflict, conflict adaptation effect, cognitive aging, cognitive control

CLC Number: 

  • B844

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