Joint Cognitive Models Reveal Sources of Robust Individual Differences in Conflict Processing

Experimental manipulations in conflict tasks, e.g., the Stroop, Flanker, and Simon tasks, lead to systematically poorer performance in “incongruent” conditions that feature stimuli that contradict task goals. However, substantial recent debate surrounds whether individual differences in conflict task behavior reflect reliable, trait-like mechanistic processes. Much prior work uses difference scores, contrasting performance between incongruent and congruent trials to index conflict suppression ability, but recent work demonstrates these scores exhibit poor psychometric properties. Formal cognitive process models suggest that individual differences in conflict suppression are driven by task-general processes, as opposed to processes specialized for conflict. However, this prior work separately models cognitive process parameters and their covariation, which fails to adequately account for measurement error. Here, we model distinct mechanisms of conflict task performance and their covariance simultaneously using hierarchical Bayesian joint modeling methods for the first time which improves individual estimation and accounts for error. We fit the conflict linear ballistic accumulator model (LBA) to two large datasets containing multiple conflict tasks and test-retest sessions, and an additional large dataset containing a conflict task and simple perceptual decision-making task. First, within conflict tasks, we found moderate test-retest reliability for both conflict-specific processing mechanisms, and, to a larger degree, task-general mechanisms. Second, task-general, but not conflict-specific, mechanisms were correlated across different conflict tasks. Third, these task-general mechanisms were correlated between conflict tasks and a simple decision-making task without conflict suppression demands. Overall, we found robust individual differences in computational mechanisms underlying general decision-making, but not mechanisms specific to conflict processing.