Conflict adaptation within but not across NoGo decision criteria: Event-related-potential evidence of specificity in the contextual modulation of cognitive control

•A Go/NoGo task randomly cued two different sets of Go/NoGo rules.•Conflict adaptation was assessed as attenuated ERPs across consecutive NoGo trials.•NoGo P3 and N2 adaptation emerged only when the same rule was applied across trials.

From the standpoint of conflict-monitoring theory (Botvinick et al., 2001), detecting an incident of information-processing conflict should attenuate the disruptive influence of information-processing conflicts encountered subsequently, by which time cognitive-control operations will have been engaged. To examine the generality of this conflict-adaptation process across task dimensions, the present research analyzed event-related potentials in a Go/NoGo task that randomly varied the NoGo decision criterion applied across trials. Sequential analyses revealed reduced-amplitude fronto-central N2 and NoGo P3 responses on the second of two consecutive NoGo trials. Importantly, both of these conflict-adaptation effects were present only when the same NoGo decision criterion was applied across trials n and n − 1. These findings support the theory that encountering information-processing conflict focuses attention on specific stimulus–response contingencies (Verguts & Notebaert, 2009) rather than engages general cognitive-control mechanisms (Freitas & Clark, 2015). Further implications for the generality of cognitive control are discussed.