Conflict-Monitoring Theory / System

Conflict-monitoring theory, also called performance-monitoring system, proposes how the brain helps detect, monitor, and resolve conflict and errors. The system is an adaptive mechanism allowing us to monitor our performance, detect any breakdowns in conflict processing, and adjust our behavior to resolve the conflict. It works like an internal evaluator that detects conflict between competing response tendencies (potential responses to conflicting situations/stimuli) — but doesn’t resolve the conflict itself. In the famous Stroop task, the word RED is printed in BLUE, creating a conflict between reading the word and naming the color. The system also responds to errors — a conflict between the intended response and the actual, incorrect response. The theory believes conflict and errors elicit a negative emotional reaction which sends the brain an aversive signal that change is needed. The sequence, according to neuropsychological research:

• Detection: Brain’s anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) continuously monitors information processing in the brain.
• Signal: When conflict is detected, the ACC sends a “need for control” signal to the prefrontal cortex (PFC) to adjust behavior and boost cognitive control. 
• Adjustment (also called adaptive control processes): The PFC increases top-down attentional filtering to resolve the immediate conflict by processing the correct, goal-relevant information and suppressing distracting/irrelevant information.
• Learning: This adjustment process, called conflict adaptation, improves performance on the current or subsequent tasks (people are faster, more accurate second time around on a task). 
• Also see Affective-Signaling Hypothesis, which extends conflict-monitoring theory by proposing a feedback loop between the ACC’s conflict detection and the PFC’s implementing control adjustments—how emotions and cognition are interconnected.