Facilitation, interference, or both? Disentangling processes in the stroop, simon, and flanker tasks using neutral...

Inhibition is crucial to adapt to new situations and resist distraction, making it a central focus of research. Here, we compare three tasks considered as gold standards for measuring inhibition: the Stroop, Simon, and Flanker tasks. These tasks involve one relevant and one irrelevant dimension. In congruent trials, both dimensions activate the same response, whereas they activate opposing ones in incongruent trials. Global interference, the reaction time difference between these trial types, confounds both the facilitation and interference effect from the task-irrelevant dimension. To better understand the underlying processes at play within these tasks, we introduced neutral trials. Distributional analyses examined the impact of reaction time on mere interference (incongruent - neutral) and mere facilitation (congruent - neutral). Our findings, replicated in Experiment 2, challenge established theories by suggesting that the classic negative-going Simon delta plot reflects a transient and automatic facilitation process, rather than slow-building inhibition. Moreover, we show that the Stroop, Simon, and Flanker tasks differ systematically in how mere interference and mere facilitation shape global interference, while also warning against misinterpreting automatic processes as controlled processes in accounts of conflict resolution. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).