The effect of alerting on cognitive control in the Simon task: An ERP study

The relationship between alerting and cognitive control is often overlooked in cognitive psychology. Previous studies have reported that alerting leads to faster overall responses while cognitive control decreases. However, these studies often confound alerting effects with the build-up of temporal expectancy as time passes. In this talk, I will present an ERP study investigating the interaction between alerting and cognitive control in the Simon Task with an auditory alerting design disentangling the effects of temporal expectancy and arousal. Behavioural results show that alerting decreases overall reaction times but increases the congruency effect, replicating previous findings. Additionally, alerting did not affect sequence dependent conflict adaption. ERP results show that alerting facilitated response selection and visuo-spatial attention, reflected by a modulation of the LRP and N2pc components, respectively. However, alerting did not modulate conflict monitoring, as measured by the N2 component. Both the behavioural and ERP results also revealed differences between two levels of alerting within the alerting condition, suggesting that the alerting–congruency interaction is driven by both temporal expectancy and arousal. These findings provide new insight into the mechanisms underlying the interaction between alerting and cognitive control. Based on the findings, I will suggest a preliminary computational model of the relationship between alerting and cognitive control and further discuss under which circumstances alerting may be beneficial or detrimental to our cognitive control.