Conflict-adaptation effects (i.e., reduced response-time costs on high-conflict trials following high-conflict trials) supposedly represent our cognitive system's ability to regulate itself according to current processing demands. However, currently it is not clear whether these effects reflect conflict-triggered, active regulation, or passive carry-over of previous-trial control settings. We u...

The human brain protects the processing of task-relevant stimuli from interference ("conflict") by task-irrelevant stimuli via attentional biasing mechanisms. The lateral prefrontal cortex has been implicated in resolving conflict between competing stimuli by selectively enhancing task-relevant stimulus representations in sensory cortices. Conversely, recent data suggest that conflict from emot...

BACKGROUND Post-conflict mental health studies in low-income countries have lacked pre-conflict data to evaluate changes in psychiatric morbidity resulting from political violence. AIMS This prospective study compares mental health before and after exposure to direct political violence during the People's War in Nepal. METHOD An adult cohort completed the Beck Depression Inventory and Beck ...

An influential account of how cognitive control deals with conflicting sources of information holds that conflict is monitored by a module that automatically recruits attention to resolve the conflict. This leads to reduced effects of conflict on the subsequent trial, a phenomenon termed conflict adaptation. A prominent question is whether control processes are domain specific--that is, recruit...

Humans adapt to context-specific frequencies of response conflicts. Typically, the impact of conflict-inducing information is reduced in contexts with high compared to low frequency of conflict. We investigated how such context-specific conflict adaptation depends on awareness and timing of conflict-eliciting stimuli and conflict-signaling contexts. In a priming paradigm, we varied the visibili...

In biological systems, prolonged conflict is costly, whereas contained conflict permits strategic innovation and refinement. Causes of variation in conflict size and duration are not well understood. We use a well-studied primate society model system to study how conflicts grow. We find conflict duration is a 'first to fight' growth process that scales superlinearly, with the number of possible...