Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The use of controlled processes to resolve cognitive conflict can have various effects on performance in memory tasks. There are two hypotheses in this regard. On one hand, the use of controlled processes required to resolve cognitive conflict may impair a deep stimulus encoding, and consequently its recall. Otherwise, it would favour the encoding and subsequent memory of the stimuli involved in it. The objective of the study is both to investigate conflict effects (i.e., stimulus and response level conflict) on memory performance and the role of encoding level in modulating that effect using different paradigms (e.g., the flanker, and task switching paradigm). The preliminary results show that conflict effects seem to be independent by the level of stimulus processing. Therefore, task-switching paradigm seems to nullify both stimulus and response-level conflict effects on memory performance. Otherwise, Flanker paradigm seems to be useful to highlight conflict effects on memory.