Article révisé par les pairs
| Résumé : | In many situations, engaging cognitive control is required to override automatic responsesand to behave in an adaptive manner. However, cognitive control is also effortful and costlywhich makes it aversive. A fundamental question is how individuals decide to engage or not incognitive control based on the costs of this effort and the motivation to achieve the goals. In thepresent study, we explored the hypothesis that affective states can influence this decision bychanging participants’ subjective experiences during the task. Participants performed a conflicttask (arrow priming) and judged their feeling of difficulty after each trial. Affective states wereinduced by presenting emotional faces (happy, fearful or neutral) at the beginning of each trial.We found that participants subjectively judged happy trials as easier even though theyobjectively made more errors in this condition. Follow-up analyses revealed that participantsengaged less cognitive control with happy than with neutral or fearful faces. We conclude thataffective states influence the recruitment of cognitive control and associated metacognitiveexperiences. |
