Conflict and Congruency Effects in Large Language Models: In-Weight and In-Context Competition in a Verbal Conflict Task
Congruency effects, observed in conflict tasks such as Stroop and flanker tasks, have been investigated for nearly a century in psychology and neuroscience, but their mechanistic basis is not fully understood. We introduce a verbal-only LLM conflict task in which a prompt stem elicits a default same-color completion and an explicit rule either agrees with (congruent condition) or conflicts with (incongruent condition) the completion. Gemma-2-2B and six Pythia models ranging from 410M to 12B parameters showed strong default same-color tendencies, and six of seven models showed strong congruency effects. Using causal attribution analysis, attention analysis, and attention ablations, we iden...
| Authors | Xiaoyang Hu, Mike Angstadt, Shane Storks et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | q-bio.NC |
| Published | 11 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 August 2026 |
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