Whether we win or with whom we watch: How international sporting events link to life satisfaction and work motivation.

Aperiodic neural activity (also called 1/ component due to its shape in the power spectrum) has gained increasing recognition as a potential marker of cortical Excitation‐Inhibition (E/I) balance in electroencephalographic (EEG) research (Ahmad et al. ; Gao et al. ). Recently, cognitive neuroscientists have begun to link aperiodic activity and E/I balance with cognitive control mechanisms (Donoghue et al. ; Gyurkovics et al. ; Voytek et al. ; Waschke et al. ; see also Gratton ). However, how aperiodic parameters evolve over time to support information processing remains unclear. In this study, we use time‐resolved analyses to investigate the temporal evolution of aperiodic EEG during the congruency effect (CEs) and the congruency sequence effect (CSE)—two canonical markers of cognitive control (Gratton ; von Bastian et al. )—offering a novel perspective on the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying these phenomena. Cognitive control enables the adaptive regulation of behavior in response to changing environmental demands (Gratton ; von Bastian et al. ). A key behavioral marker of cognitive control is the CE—a robust phenomenon in conflict tasks whereby performance systematically depends on the congruency between task‐relevant and task‐irrelevant information (Eriksen and Eriksen ; Gratton et al. ). Incongruent trials, which require resolving competing stimulus–response associations, typically elicit slower responses and more errors than congruent trials. The CE emerges from the interplay of distinct processes engaged during task performance, including perceptual, attentional, and executive mechanisms. Nevertheless, its most prominent interpretation is as an index of cognitive control: the interference captured by the CE represents the very conditions in which cognitive control must be engaged, that is, a situation where task‐irrelevant information impedes goal‐directedness. Consequently, greater interference necessitates stronger top‐down regulation, which is why the CE is widely regarded as a central marker of cognitive control (Eriksen and Eriksen ; Gratton et al. ; von Bastian et al. ). Beyond this immediate performance cost, cognitive control also shows adjustments based on trial history. This is reflected in the CSE (Gratton et al. ; Egner )—a reduction of the CE following incongruent relative to congruent trials, typically interpreted as a transient upregulation of cognitive control (Botvinick et al. ). The CSE has been explained by several theoretical accounts, with some proposing the engagement of cognitive control and others suggesting it operates without direct control involvement. The most prominent cognitive control account, the conflict‐monitoring theory (Botvinick et al. ), posits a dedicated conflict‐monitoring system that detects the simultaneous activation of competing response tendencies, as occurs in incongruent trials. The resulting conflict signal triggers an upregulation of cognitive control, which enhances performance on subsequent incongruent trials, reducing the CE. At the neural level, activity in the conflict‐monitoring unit has been linked to the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), while the upregulation of control is thought to rely on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC; Botvinick et al. ). Alternative non‐control related accounts emphasize the involvement of learning and memory processes rather than cognitive control. For instance, , , and accounts propose that trial‐to‐trial changes may be driven by automatic processes, such as retrieval of stimulus–response bindings, stimulus repetitions, or learned associations between stimuli and responses (for a review, see Braem et al. ). Importantly, research shows that the CSE can still occur in the absence of these factors (Jiménez and Méndez ; Kim and Cho ; Schmidt and Weissman ; Weissman et al. ; Gyurkovics, Stafford, and Levita ; Gyurkovics, Kovacs, et al. ; Gyurkovics and Levita ). Overall, evidence indicates that the CSE likely reflects a combination of cognitive control and non‐control mechanisms, making it a well‐established albeit impure indicator of control adjustments (Abrahamse et al. ; Egner ).