Development of conflict detection during thinking – DEVCON

Decades of reasoning and decision-making research have shown that human judgment is often biased by intuitive heuristics. Recent studies on conflict detection during thinking nevertheless indicate that despite their biased response, adults typically do detect that their answer is not fully warranted and conflicts with logical considerations. This conflict sensitivity suggests that people are biased because they fail to override the tempting intuitions and has important implications for our view of human rationality and the design of intervention programs to de-bias our reasoning.

Unfortunately, existing conflict detection studies have focused exclusively on adults’ performance. The development of the conflict detection process during thinking has received little attention. Basic neurological evidence does indicate that the critical brain structure that is supposed to be mediating conflict detection processing, the Anterior Cingulate Cortex, is quite late to mature and would not reach full functionality until middle adolescence. This tentatively suggests that in contrast with adults, younger reasoners might have difficulties detecting the biased nature of their heuristic judgment during reasoning. This is a fundamental issue because it implies that younger children would need a radically different type of de-bias training than adults. Despite the clear educational and societal importance of this issue, the lack of developmental conflict detection research does currently not allow us to tackle it. The core objective of the present project is to address this shortcoming in the reasoning field and fully document the development of children’s conflict detection efficiency over the critical elementary and secondary school years.

To reach our objective, participants in the preadolescent to young adulthood age range will always be presented with sets of classic reasoning tasks in our experiments. Conflict detection will be assessed with a wide range of behavioural and neuroscientific procedures. The planned studies are grouped in three integrated workpackages that will chronologically build upon one another. In the initial Workpackage 1 (month 1-5) we will construct a database with age appropriate material that will be used for our actual conflict detection experiments. In Workpackage 2 (month 6-15) we will rely on behavioral testing procedures (i.e., latency, recall, and response confidence measures) to contrast the conflict detection efficiency in different age groups. In Workpackage 3 (month 16-36) we will fine-tune and validate the findings with neuroscientific test procedures (i.e., fMRI, EEG, and SCR measures) that will directly focus on the role of the Anterior Cingulate Cortex.

Taken together the planned experimental workpackages will result in a full behavioural and neurological specification of the development of the conflict detection process during thinking. The generated key data in this fundamental research project will be paramount for the development of more efficient future training programs aimed at helping children avoid biased thinking.