ABSTRACT

In many situations, engaging cognitive control is required to override automatic responses and to behave in an adaptive manner. However, cognitive control is also effortful and costly which makes it aversive. A fundamental question is how individuals decide to engage or not in cognitive control based on the costs of this effort and the motivation to achieve the goals. In the present study, we explored the hypothesis that affective states can influence this decision by changing participants’ subjective experiences during the task. Participants performed a conflict task (arrow priming) and judged their feeling of difficulty after each trial. Affective states were induced by presenting emotional faces (happy, fearful or neutral) at the beginning of each trial. We found that participants subjectively judged happy trials as easier even though they objectively made more errors in this condition. Follow-up analyses revealed that participants engaged less cognitive control with happy than with neutral or fearful faces. We conclude that affective states influence the recruitment of cognitive control and associated metacognitive experiences.

摘要

在许多情况下，需要进行认知控制以超越自动响应并以适应性方式行事。然而，认知控制也是费力且昂贵的，这使得它令人厌恶。一个基本问题是个人如何根据这种努力的成本和实现目标的动机来决定是否参与认知控制。在本研究中，我们探讨了情感状态可以通过改变参与者在任务期间的主观体验来影响这一决定的假设。参与者执行冲突任务（箭头启动）并在每次试验后判断他们的困难感。通过在每次试验开始时呈现情绪化的面孔（快乐、恐惧或中立）来诱导情感状态。我们发现参与者主观地认为快乐的试验更容易，即使他们在这种情况下客观地犯了更多的错误。后续分析显示，与中性或恐惧面孔相比，参与者对快乐的认知控制较少。我们得出结论，情感状态会影响认知控制和相关元认知体验的招募。