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Neural correlates of the essence of conscious conflict: fMRI of sustaining incompatible intentions

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Abstract

The study of intrapsychic conflict has long been central to many key theories about the control of behavior. More recently, by focusing on the nature of conflicting processes in the brain, investigators have revealed great insights about controlled versus automatic processes and the nature of self-control. Despite these advances, many theories of cognitive control or self-control remain agnostic about the function of subjective awareness (i.e., basic consciousness). Why people consciously experience some conflicts in the nervous system but not others remains a mystery. One hypothesis is that people become conscious only of conflicts involving competition for the control of skeletal muscle. To test one aspect of this larger hypothesis, in the present study, 14 participants were trained to introspect the feeling of conflict (the urge to make an error during a Stroop color-word interference task) and then were asked to introspect in the same way while sustaining simple compatible and incompatible intentions during fMRI scanning (to move a finger left or right). As predicted, merely sustaining incompatible skeletomotor intentions prior to their execution produced stronger systematic changes in subjective experience than sustaining compatible intentions, as indicated by self-report ratings obtained in the scanner. Similar ratings held for a modified Stroop-like task when contrasting incompatible versus compatible trials also during fMRI scanning. We use subjective ratings as the basis of parametric analyses of fMRI data, focusing a priori on the brain regions involved in action-related urges (e.g., parietal cortex) and cognitive control (e.g., dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, lateral PFC). The results showed that subjective conflict from sustaining incompatible intentions was consistently related to activity in the left post-central gyrus.

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Acknowledgments

Supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health to E. Morsella (F32-MH69083) and to J. Bargh (R01-MH60767). This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0644131 to J. R. Gray. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. E. Morsella received support also from the Center for Human Culture and Behavior at San Francisco State University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Jeremy R. Gray

  2. Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    John A. Bargh

  3. Department of Psychology, San Francisco State University (SFSU), 1600 Holloway Avenue, EP 301, San Francisco, CA, 94132-4168, USA

    Ezequiel Morsella

  4. Department of Neurology, University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Ezequiel Morsella

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  1. Jeremy R. Gray
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Correspondence to Ezequiel Morsella.

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Gray, J.R., Bargh, J.A. & Morsella, E. Neural correlates of the essence of conscious conflict: fMRI of sustaining incompatible intentions. Exp Brain Res 229, 453–465 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-013-3566-5

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