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Project

Great minds think alike: The contagious nature of cognitive control

Cognitive control kicks in when our routine behaviour is no longer sufficient to perform well. Without this ability to rapidly and flexibly adapt our thoughts and actions in response to difficult situations, barely any daily activity would be possible in our complex world. The current project focuses on how the behavior of others influences this exertion of cognitive control. Although the influence of the mere presence of another person on performance has been studied extensively, the influence of what that other person is thinking or doing has been largely neglected so far. Crucially, we are interested in whether and how our cognitive control exertion is affected by the cognitive control exerted by the people surrounding us. Put differently: is cognitive control contagious? For instance, does the fact that the person next to me in the library is working very hard, influence the degree to which I focus on my own work? In order to address this thought-provoking question, we will use an adapted version of the joint Simon paradigm. First, we will use this paradigm to investigate an absolute prerequisite for cognitive control to be contagious, namely our ability to detect cognitive control in others. Second, we will study precisely which behavioral cues we pick up from the other based on which we adapt our own cognitive control exertion. Finally, we will unravel the neural and psychophysiological mechanisms underlying cognitive control contagion.

Date:1 Nov 2019 →  1 Nov 2021
Keywords:Cognitive Control, Contagion
Disciplines:Cognitive processes
Project type:PhD project