How the brain resolves high conflict situations: double conflict involvement of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

Executive control is a human ability that allows to overcome automatic stimulus-response mappings and to act appropriate in the context of a task where the selection of relevant stimuli and the suppression of interfering information are crucial. In order to address the question which brain areas are involved in the detection and processing of two simultaneously operating sources of interference derived from a spatial incompatibility task, we used functional MRI to contrast neural activity related to a double conflict situation to single incompatibility conditions. Results show signal increase of left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex when monitoring simultaneously presented conflict. There was no additional activity in the medial prefrontal cortex or anterior cingulate cortex although these regions are expected to play an important role in all types of conflict monitoring. Further analyses of conflict resolution and post-error adaptation pointed to different underlying functional mechanisms. While the resolution of high conflict was associated with rostral ACC activation, the post-error adaptation reflecting activity during post-error trials suggests a specific medial and lateral prefrontal network which was functionally distinct from conflict-related activity. Our results also suggest a major role for the basal ganglia during error detection and resolution.