Link to bioRxiv paper: http://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2020.10.31.363192v1?rss=1 Authors: Nuiten, S. A., Canales-Johnson, A., Beerendonk, L., Nanuashvili, N., Fahrenfort, J. J., Bekinschtein, T., van Gaal, S. Abstract: Conflict detection in sensory input is central to adaptive human behavior. Perhaps unsurprisingly, past research has shown that conflict may be detected even in the absence of conflict awareness, suggesting that conflict detection is a fully automatic process that does not require attention. Across six behavioral tasks, we manipulated task relevance and response overlap of potentially conflicting stimulus features to test the possibility of conflict processing in the absence of attention. Multivariate analyses on human electroencephalographic data revealed that neural signatures of conflict are only present when at least one feature of a conflicting stimulus is attended, regardless of whether that feature is part of the conflict. In contrast, neural signatures of basic sensory processes are present even when a stimulus is completely unattended. These data reveal an attentional bottleneck at the level of objects, suggesting that object-based attention is a prerequisite for cognitive control operations involved in conflict detection. Copy rights belong to original authors. Visit the link for more info