TY - JOUR T1 - Tracking dynamic adjustments to decision making and performance monitoring processes in conflict tasks JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/2019.12.19.883447 SP - 2019.12.19.883447 AU - Daniel Feuerriegel AU - Matthew Jiwa AU - William F Turner AU - Milan Andrejević AU - Robert Hester AU - Stefan Bode Y1 - 2019/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/12/20/2019.12.19.883447.abstract N2 - How we exert control over our decision making has been investigated using conflict tasks, which involve stimuli containing elements that are either congruent or incongruent. In these tasks, participants adapt their decision making strategies following exposure to incongruent stimuli. According to conflict monitoring accounts, conflicting stimulus features are detected in medial frontal cortex, and the extent of experienced conflict scales with response time (RT) and frontal theta-band activity in the electroencephalogram (EEG). However, the consequent adjustments to decision processes following response conflict are not well-specified. To characterise these adjustments and their neural implementation we recorded EEG during a Flanker task. We traced the time-courses of performance monitoring processes (frontal theta) and multiple processes related to perceptual decision making. In each trial participants judged which of two overlaid gratings forming a plaid stimulus (termed the S1 target) was of higher contrast. The stimulus was divided into two sections, which each contained higher contrast gratings in either congruent or incongruent directions. Shortly after responding to the S1 target, an additional S2 target was presented, which was always congruent. Our EEG results suggest enhanced sensory evidence representations in visual cortex and reduced evidence accumulation rates for S2 targets following incongruent S1 stimuli. Frontal theta amplitudes positively correlated with RT following S1 targets (in line with conflict monitoring accounts). Following S2 targets there was no such correlation, and theta amplitude profiles instead resembled decision evidence accumulation trajectories. Based on these differing amplitude profiles across S1 and S2 we formulated a novel theory of frontal theta and performance monitoring, which accounts for differing theta amplitude profiles previously observed across tasks that do and do not involve conflict. We propose that frontal theta does not actually index conflict detection but instead reflects a more general performance monitoring process related to decision confidence and rapid error detection. ER -