The cognitive conflict effects on memory: how different cognitive conflicts affect incidental encoding

Cognitive control, encompassing the complementary functions of cognitive stability and cognitive flexibility, allows individuals to regulate thoughts and behaviors according to internal goals and external demands. These control mechanisms support adaptive attention and goal-directed behavior when cognitive conflict arises. The present dissertation investigated how distinct conflict types—task-level, stimulus-level, and response-level conflict—affect memory encoding as a function of the processing phase in which they occur and considering the source of the conflict. Across three experimental studies, both attentional and schema-based conflicts were manipulated to clarify their specific and combined effects on incidental encoding. The first two studies revealed that task- and response-level conflicts jointly impair memory selectivity by promoting distractor encoding, whereas stimulus-level conflict alone did not affect target encoding. Thus, manipulating the stimulus-level conflict magnitude in the second study, we showed that this conflict mainly affects distractors encoding. Then, the third study examined schema-based conflict, showing that incongruent information with pre-existing knowledge (or schema) impairs, rather than enhances, incidental encoding. This last study revealed different cognitive conflict effects according to its source (attentional vs. schema-based conflict). Indeed, the schema-based conflict seems to impair memory performance in contrast to what we observed for attentional conflict. This latter conflict seems to favour incidental encoding of specific type of stimuli (i.e., distractors), according to the specific processing phase in which arise. Building on these findings, the dissertation introduces two hypotheses that may explain how cognitive conflict may affect memory encoding. According to the collaborative hypothesis, the conflict resolution may promote the incidental encoding of conflictual stimuli. On the contrary, the competitive hypothesis posits that limited cognitive resources prevent simultaneous conflict resolution and effective encoding of the stimuli. Overall, this work provides a new framework for understanding how attentional mechanisms and knowledge structures may influence incidental encoding.