Enemy in imagination: Processing of imagery conflict during mental rotation

Previous studies using the Stroop task have focused on stimulus and response conflicts. However, to our knowledge, it remains unknown whether conflicts can arise without stimulus conflict. Here, we design a novel mental-rotation arrow-gaze Stroop task including two experiments to investigate the interactions between the conflict processing and mental rotation. In Experiment 1, the face was set to be upright and oriented 90°clockwise or anticlockwise, the eyes in the face could look left or right in a head-centered frame, but the face itself could be oriented 90° clockwise or anticlockwise, while the upright face condition serves as a baseline. Next in the second experiment, the face was rotated to 45° or 135° (clockwise or anticlockwise). For the both Experiments, participants were asked to imagine whether the gaze direction shifted to the left or right if the face were upright, with the left or right pointing arrow superimposed on top of the face. The direction of the arrow can be congruent or incongruent with the gaze direction. Qualitatively, we conducted a systematic hierarchical Bayesian estimation of three conflict DDMs including DMC, DSTP, and SSP to generate predicted data for model comparison; Quantitatively, we further compared three models (DMC/DSTP/SSP) for accounting data sets based on the log-Bayes factor calculation. We found that the extent of conflicts decreased as the degree of mental rotation got larger. These findings provide novel evidence of the existence of the interaction between cognitive control and mental rotation, and comparison of the models to data revealed a superiority of DSTP over DMC and SSP in most cases.