Common and distinct BOLD correlates of Simon and flanker conflicts which can(not) be reduced to time-on-task effects

Abstract

The ability to identify and resolve conflicts between standard, well trained behaviors, and behaviors required by the current context is an essential feature of cognitive control. To date, no consensus has been reached on the brain mechanisms involved in exerting such control: while some studies identified diverse patterns of activity across different conflicts, other studies reported common resources across conflict tasks or even across simple tasks devoid of conflict component. The latter reports attributed the entire activity observed in the presence of conflict to longer time spent on the task (i.e. to the so-called time-on-task effects). Here we used an extended Multi-Source Interference Task (MSIT) which combines Simon and flanker types of interference to determine shared and conflict-specific mechanisms of conflict resolution in fMRI, and their separability from the time-on-task effects. Large portions of the activity in the dorsal attention network and decreases of activity in the default mode network were shared across the tasks and scaled in parallel with increasing reaction times. Importantly, activity in the sensory and sensorimotor cortices, as well as in the posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC)-a key region implicated in conflict processing-could not be exhaustively explained by the time-on-task effects.