Improving the measurement of attentional conflict resolution

Defence-force personnel must sustain optimal performance under pressure. In a transdisciplinary Delphi study (Albertella et al., 2021) the RDoC “attention” construct was selected as a key cognitive systems capacity enabling optimal performance. One of the principle attention components required for high performance is resolving response conflicts by selectively attending to relevant information and inhibiting irrelevant information. This is measured in a range of “conflict” tasks where the irrelevant information comes from the automatic habits (reading in the Stroop task, e.g., name the print colour of “GREEN”; MacLeod, 1991), the locations of the decision stimulus (the Simon task, e.g., when a signal occurring on the left requires a right-hand response, Hommel, 2011) or visually adjacent stimuli (e.g., the Flanker task, which direction does the central arrow point “<<><<”; Eriksen, 1995). Unfortunately, over the last few years it has become accepted that reliable measurement of individual differences in these tasks requires participants to complete many more trials and/or to use tasks with larger effect sizes than are typical of existing cognitive batteries (Hedge et al., 2018a).