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Bilinguals sometimes outperform monolinguals on tasks involving cognitive control – the regulation of mental activity when confronted with information-processing conflict – perhaps stemming from experience monitoring for and resolving conflict between languages. We test the hypothesis that bilingualism affects moment-to-moment cognitive-control recruitment by examining how trial history influences bilinguals’ and monolinguals’ behavioral performance and associated neural activity on a Stroop task. We assessed dynamic effects of preceding trial conflict on current trial performance to separate the ability to proactively detect conflict (performance on new instances of conflict) from the ability to reactively recruit cognitive control (performance on trials following conflict). Across two experiments, monolinguals’ – but not bilinguals’ – accuracy decreased after non-conflict trials, i.e., when detecting initial conflicts. Bilinguals exhibited greater conflict-detection activity in ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC/insula; BA 47) within a language-switching network, suggesting that they may monitor for information-conflict more proactively than monolinguals by recruiting brain regions involved in switching languages.
