scholarly journals Sustained and Transient Processes in Event-based Prospective Memory in Adolescence and Adulthood

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (10) ◽  
pp. 1924-1945
Author(s):  
Lucía Magis-Weinberg ◽  
Ruud Custers ◽  
Iroise Dumontheil

Prospective memory (PM) refers to the cognitive processes associated with remembering to perform an intended action after a delay. Varying the salience of PM cues while keeping the intended response constant, we investigated the extent to which participants relied on strategic monitoring, through sustained, top–down control, or on spontaneous retrieval via transient bottom–up processes. There is mixed evidence regarding developmental improvements in event-based PM performance after the age of 13 years. We compared PM performance and associated sustained and transient neural correlates in 28 typically developing adolescents (12–17 years old) and 19 adults (23–30 years old). Lower PM cue salience associated with slower ongoing task (OT) RTs, reflected by increased μ ex-Gaussian parameter, and sustained increases in frontoparietal activation during OT blocks, both thought to reflect greater proactive control supporting cue monitoring. Behavioral and neural correlates of PM trials were not specifically modulated by cue salience, revealing little difference in reactive control between conditions. The effect of cue salience was similar across age groups, suggesting that adolescents are able to adapt proactive control engagement to PM task demands. Exploratory analyses showed that younger, but not older, adolescents were less accurate and slower in PM trials relative to OT trials than adults and showed greater transient activation in PM trials in an occipito-temporal cluster. These results provide evidence of both mature and still maturing aspects of cognitive processes associated with implementation of an intention after a delay during early adolescence.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth R. Koslov ◽  
Arjun Mukerji ◽  
Katlyn Rose Hedgpeth ◽  
Jarrod Lewis-Peacock

Cognitive control involves the allocation of cognitive resources in order to successfully navigate and interact with the world. Oftentimes, control involves balancing the demands brought on by performing immediately relevant tasks and those required in order to perform future intended actions. For example, directing attention towards navigating through traffic on a highway while also needing to remember to exit the freeway at a particular street. This ability to delay execution of a goal until the appropriate time in the future is referred to as prospective memory (PM). The dual mechanisms of cognitive control (DMC) framework posits that individuals can use two different strategies to remember an intended action: a proactive control strategy involving working memory maintenance of the goal and monitoring of the environment, or a reactive control strategy relying on timely retrieval of goal information from episodic memory. Previous research on prospective memory has demonstrated that performance improves when individuals engage these control strategies in accordance with the demands of the task environment. However, it is unclear how people select a control strategy, particularly in situations with dynamic task demands. We hypothesized that if people flexibly adapt their strategy in response to changes in the environment, this should facilitate prospective memory. Across two experiments, we asked participants to identify the reappearance of a picture target (a prospective memory intention) while at the same time performing an ongoing visual search task. The attentional demands of the ongoing task were manipulated to monotonically increase or decrease on a moment to moment basis. The selection of control strategies was identified using reaction time costs and neural measures of intention maintenance. Results showed that people fluidly modified control strategies, shifting towards proactive control when the attentional demands decreased, and shifting towards reactive control when attentional demands increased. Critically, these adaptive shifts in control strategy were associated with better prospective memory performance. These results demonstrate that fine-grained control of attention and memory resources serves an adaptive role for remembering to carry out future plans.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fanny Grisetto ◽  
Yvonne N. Delevoye-Turrell ◽  
Clémence Roger

AbstractFlexible use of reactive and proactive control according to environmental demands is the key to adaptive behavior. In this study, forty-eight adults performed ten blocks of an AX-CPT task to reveal the strength of proactive control by the calculation of the proactive behavioral index (PBI). They also filled out the UPPS questionnaire to assess their impulsiveness. The median-split method based on the global UPPS score distribution was used to categorize participants as having high (HI) or low (LI) impulsiveness traits. The analyses revealed that the PBI was negatively correlated with the UPPS scores, suggesting that the higher is the impulsiveness, the weaker the dominance of proactive control processes. We showed, at an individual level, that the PBI increased across blocks and suggested that this effect was due to a smaller decrease in reactive control processes. Notably, the PBI increase was slower in the HI group than in the LI group. Moreover, participants who did not adapt to task demands were all characterized as high impulsive. Overall, the current study demonstrates that (1) impulsiveness is associated with less dominant proactive control due to (2) slower adaptation to task demands (3) driven by a stronger reliance on reactive processes. These findings are discussed in regards to pathological populations.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. e31659 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giorgia Cona ◽  
Giorgio Arcara ◽  
Vincenza Tarantino ◽  
Patrizia Silvia Bisiacchi

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse C Niebaum ◽  
Nicolas Chevalier ◽  
Ryan Mori Guild ◽  
Yuko Munakata

Developmental changes in executive function are often explained in terms of core cognitive processes and associated neural substrates. For example, younger children tend to engage control reactively in the moment as needed, whereas older children increasingly engage control proactively, in anticipation of needing it. Such developments may reflect increasing capacities for active maintenance dependent upon dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. However, younger children will engage proactive control when reactive control is made more difficult, suggesting that developmental changes may also reflect decisions about whether to engage control, and how. We tested awareness of temporal control demands and associated task choices in 5- and 10-year-olds and adults using a demand selection task. Participants chose between one task that enabled proactive control and another task that enabled reactive control. Adults reported awareness of these different control demands and preferentially played the proactive task option. Ten-year-olds reported awareness of control demands but selected task options at chance. Five-year-olds showed neither awareness nor task preference, but a subsample who exhibited awareness of control demands preferentially played the reactive task option, mirroring their typical control mode. Thus, developmental improvements in executive function may in part reflect better awareness of cognitive demands and adaptive behavior, which may in turn reflect changes in dorsal anterior cingulate in signaling task demands to lateral prefrontal cortex.


2011 ◽  
Vol 64 (11) ◽  
pp. 2194-2210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Rummel ◽  
C. Dennis Boywitt ◽  
Thorsten Meiser

The class of multinomial processing tree (MPT) models has been used extensively in cognitive psychology to model latent cognitive processes. Critical for the usefulness of a MPT model is its psychological validity. Generally, the validity of a MPT model is demonstrated by showing that its parameters are selectively and predictably affected by theoretically meaningful experimental manipulations. Another approach is to test the convergent validity of the model parameters and other extraneous measures intended to measure the same cognitive processes. Here, we advance the concept of construct validity (Cronbach & Meehl, 1955) as a criterion for model validity in MPT modelling and show how this approach can be fruitfully utilized using the example of a MPT model of event-based prospective memory. For that purpose, we investigated the convergent validity of the model parameters and established extraneous measures of prospective memory processes over a range of experimental settings, and we found a lack of convergent validity between the two indices. On a conceptual level, these results illustrate the importance of testing convergent validity. Additionally, they have implications for prospective memory research, because they demonstrate that the MPT model of event-based prospective memory is not able to differentiate between different processes contributing to prospective memory performance.


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