Effects of Reward and Punishment on Conflict Processing: Same or Different?

While it is commonly known that reward and punishment are two effective motivators of behavior, little is known about the underlying mechanisms of reward and punishment in conflict processing. Here, we examined what roles reward and punishment played in this cognitive process by using a revised version of Stroop task. Confining to incongruent trials, explicit reward association in task-relevant dimension obstructed the processing of conflict information in Experiment 1, while the explicit punishment association in task-relevant dimension enhanced the conflict processing relative to the no-punishment condition in Experiment 2, suggesting the mechanisms of reward and punishment are different from each other with the possible involvement of particularly used strategy. Additionally, both reward associations and punishment associations to task-irrelevant dimension showed faster response time in conflict processing, which likely reflected the roles of reward and punishment were the same when they were implicitly related to conflict processing. Such results document that the effects of reward and punishment on conflict processing are modulated by the involvement of consciousness, supporting the flexible roles of reward and punishment in conflict processing.