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The purpose of the present study was to determine whether responding to multiple concurrent conflicts results in a simultaneous or sequential conflict resolution. To this end, we measured event-related potentials (ERPs) in a paradigm combining a Stroop and a flanker task. In this paradigm, participants were asked to respond to the color of the central letter while ignoring the meaning of the word (Stroop task) and the color of the flanking letters (flanker task). Trials were either incongruent (i.e., inducing a conflict between two response alternatives) or congruent (i.e., inducing no response conflict) in both tasks, or incongruent in one task and congruent in the other task. The behavioral results showed a smaller Stroop congruency effect (i.e., a smaller difference between Stroop incongruent and congruent trials) for flanker incongruent than for flanker congruent trials, replicating previous findings. The ERP results showed that an early ERP component (i.e., P2) was associated with the resolution of the flanker conflict, whereas a later component (i.e., N450) was associated with the resolution of the Stroop conflict. Together, these findings emphasize a sequential organization of conflict resolution processes in the brain which is adaptive when facing multiple concurrent conflicts., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Adjusting behavior following errors is essential for successful goal-directed performance. Error-related pupil dilation indicates increased autonomic arousal and has been shown to predict adaptive adjustments of post-error behavior. Because different types of errors may require different behavioral adjustments, we investigated whether this process is also sensitive to the evaluation of different types of errors. We used a four-choice flanker task where errors occur either by pressing a button associated with the distractors (flanker errors), or by pressing a button not associated with the stimulus at all (nonflanker errors). Flanker errors imply suboptimal selective attention to the target and are therefore of increased significance for successful performance. Pupil dilation was larger for flanker errors than nonflanker errors, and only pupil dilation on flanker errors predicted a decrease of error probability on the next trial. Moreover, the error-related negativity, an electrophysiological marker of early error monitoring in the medial frontal cortex, was larger on flanker errors anticipating the effect of error type on pupil dilation. These results show that error-related pupil dilation is sensitive to the type and significance of errors and correlates with adaptive behavioral adjustments accordingly. This suggests that mechanisms underlying error-related pupil dilation receive inputs from error evaluation mechanisms in the medial frontal cortex., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)