scholarly journals Alcohol Hangover Slightly Impairs Response Selection but not Response Inhibition

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (9) ◽  
pp. 1317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antje Opitz ◽  
Jan Hubert ◽  
Christian Beste ◽  
Ann-Kathrin Stock

Alcohol hangover commonly occurs after an episode of heavy drinking. It has previously been demonstrated that acute high-dose alcohol intoxication reduces cognitive control, while automatic processes remain comparatively unaffected. However, it has remained unclear whether alcohol hangover, as a consequence of binge drinking, modulates the interplay between cognitive control and automaticity in a comparable way. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of alcohol hangover on controlled versus automatic response selection and inhibition. N = 34 healthy young men completed a Simon Nogo task, once sober and once hungover. Hangover symptoms were experimentally induced by a standardized administration of alcoholic drinks (with high congener content) on the night before the hangover appointment. We found no significant hangover effects, which suggests that alcohol hangover did not produce the same functional deficits as an acute high-dose intoxication. Yet still, add-on Bayesian analyses revealed that hangover slightly impaired response selection, but not response inhibition. This pattern of effects cannot be explained with the current knowledge on how ethanol and its metabolite acetaldehyde may modulate response selection and inhibition via the dopaminergic or GABAergic system.

2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann-Kathrin Stock ◽  
Tom Schulz ◽  
Martin Lenhardt ◽  
Meinolf Blaszkewicz ◽  
Christian Beste

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann‐Kathrin Stock ◽  
Wiebke Bensmann ◽  
Nicolas Zink ◽  
Alexander Münchau ◽  
Christian Beste

Author(s):  
L. Vainio ◽  
K. Tiippana ◽  
T. Peromaa ◽  
C. Kuuramo ◽  
I. Kurki

AbstractHabituated response tendency associated with affordance of an object is automatically inhibited if this affordance cue is extracted from a non-target object. This study presents two go/no-go experiments investigating whether this response control operates in response selection processes and whether it is linked to conflict-monitoring mechanisms. In the first experiment, the participants performed responses with one hand, and in the second experiment, with two hands. In addition, both experiments consisted of two blocks with varying frequency of go conditions (25%-go vs. 75%-go). The non-target-related response inhibition effect was only observed in Experiment 2 when the task required selecting between two hands. Additionally, the results did not reveal patterns typically related to conflict monitoring when go-frequency is manipulated and when a stimulus–response compatibility effect is examined relative to congruency condition of the previous trial. The study shows that the non-target-related response inhibition assists hand selection and is relatively resistant to conflict-monitoring processes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Antje Opitz ◽  
Filippo Ghin ◽  
Jan Hubert ◽  
Joris C. Verster ◽  
Christian Beste ◽  
...  

AbstractBehavioral automatization usually makes us more efficient and less error-prone, but may also foster dysfunctional behavior like alcohol abuse. Yet, it has remained unclear whether alcohol itself causes the shift from controlled to habitual behavior commonly observed in alcohol use disorder (AUD). We thus investigated how the acute and post-acute effects of binge drinking affect the automatization of motor response sequences and the execution of automated vs. controlled motor response sequences. N = 70 healthy young men performed a newly developed automatization paradigm once sober and once after binge drinking (half of them intoxicated and half of them hungover). While we found no significant effects of alcohol hangover, acute intoxication (~ 1.2 ‰) had two dissociable effects: Firstly, it impaired the automatization of complex motor response sequence execution. Secondly, it eliminated learning effects in response selection and pre-motor planning processes. The results suggest that alcohol hangover did not affect controlled or automated processes, and disprove the assumption that alcohol intoxication generally spares or facilitates motor response sequence automatization. As these effects could be specific to the investigated explicit learning context, acute intoxication might potentially still improve the execution of pre-existing automatisms and/or the implicit acquisition of motor response sequence automatisms.


Author(s):  
David Beltrán ◽  
Bo Liu ◽  
Manuel de Vega

AbstractNegation is known to have inhibitory consequences for the information under its scope. However, how it produces such effects remains poorly understood. Recently, it has been proposed that negation processing might be implemented at the neural level by the recruitment of inhibitory and cognitive control mechanisms. On this line, this manuscript offers the hypothesis that negation reuses general-domain mechanisms that subserve inhibition in other non-linguistic cognitive functions. The first two sections describe the inhibitory effects of negation on conceptual representations and its embodied effects, as well as the theoretical foundations for the reuse hypothesis. The next section describes the neurophysiological evidence that linguistic negation interacts with response inhibition, along with the suggestion that both functions share inhibitory mechanisms. Finally, the manuscript concludes that the functional relation between negation and inhibition observed at the mechanistic level could be easily integrated with predominant cognitive models of negation processing.


2019 ◽  
Vol 121 (5) ◽  
pp. 1633-1643 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maik Pertermann ◽  
Moritz Mückschel ◽  
Nico Adelhöfer ◽  
Tjalf Ziemssen ◽  
Christian Beste

Several lines of evidence suggest that there is a close interrelation between the degree of noise in neural circuits and the activity of the norepinephrine (NE) system, yet the precise nexus between these aspects is far from being understood during human information processing and cognitive control in particular. We examine this nexus during response inhibition in n = 47 healthy participants. Using high-density EEG recordings, we estimate neural noise by calculating “1/ f noise” of those data and integrate these EEG parameters with pupil diameter data as an established indirect index of NE system activity. We show that neural noise is reduced when cognitive control processes to inhibit a prepotent/automated response are exerted. These neural noise variations were confined to the theta frequency band, which has also been shown to play a central role during response inhibition and cognitive control. There were strong positive correlations between the 1 /f neural noise parameter and the pupil diameter data within the first 250 ms after the Nogo stimulus presentation at centro-parietal electrode sites. No such correlations were evident during automated responding on Go trials. Source localization analyses using standardized low-resolution brain electromagnetic tomography show that inferior parietal areas are activated in this time period in Nogo trials. The data suggest an interrelation of NE system activity and neural noise within early stages of information processing associated with inferior parietal areas when cognitive control processes are required. The data provide the first direct evidence for the nexus between NE system activity and the modulation of neural noise during inhibitory control in humans. NEW & NOTEWORTHY This is the first study showing that there is a nexus between norepinephrine system activity and the modulation of neural noise or scale-free neural activity during inhibitory control in humans. It does so by integrating pupil diameter data with analysis of EEG neural noise.


2022 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Gagnon ◽  
Joyce Emma Quansah ◽  
Paul McNicoll

Research on cognitive processes has primarily focused on cognitive control and inhibitory processes to the detriment of other psychological processes, such as defense mechanisms (DMs), which can be used to modify aggressive impulses as well as self/other images during interpersonal conflicts. First, we conducted an in-depth theoretical analysis of three socio-cognitive models and three psychodynamic models and compared main propositions regarding the source of aggression and processes that influence its enactment. Second, 32 participants completed the Hostile Expectancy Violation Paradigm (HEVP) in which scenarios describe a hostile vs. non-hostile social context followed by a character's ambiguous aversive behavior. The N400 effect to critical words that violate expected hostile vs. non-hostile intent of the behavior was analyzed. Prepotent response inhibition was measured using a Stop Signal task (SST) and DMs were assessed with the Defense Style Questionnaire (DSQ-60). Results showed that reactive aggression and HIA were not significantly correlated with response inhibition but were significantly positively and negatively correlated with image distorting defense style and adaptive defense style, respectively. The present article has highlighted the importance of integrating socio-cognitive and psychodynamic models to account for the full complexity underlying psychological processes that influence reactive aggressive behavior.


Cancers ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (19) ◽  
pp. 4942
Author(s):  
Maria Grazia Ronga ◽  
Marco Cavallone ◽  
Annalisa Patriarca ◽  
Amelia Maia Leite ◽  
Pierre Loap ◽  
...  

The development of innovative approaches that would reduce the sensitivity of healthy tissues to irradiation while maintaining the efficacy of the treatment on the tumor is of crucial importance for the progress of the efficacy of radiotherapy. Recent methodological developments and innovations, such as scanned beams, ultra-high dose rates, and very high-energy electrons, which may be simultaneously available on new accelerators, would allow for possible radiobiological advantages of very short pulses of ultra-high dose rate (FLASH) therapy for radiation therapy to be considered. In particular, very high-energy electron (VHEE) radiotherapy, in the energy range of 100 to 250 MeV, first proposed in the 2000s, would be particularly interesting both from a ballistic and biological point of view for the establishment of this new type of irradiation technique. In this review, we examine and summarize the current knowledge on VHEE radiotherapy and provide a synthesis of the studies that have been published on various experimental and simulation works. We will also consider the potential for VHEE therapy to be translated into clinical contexts.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dragica Jorgovanovic ◽  
Mengjia Song ◽  
Liping Wang ◽  
Yi Zhang

Abstract Background Interferon-γ (IFN-γ) plays a key role in activation of cellular immunity and subsequently, stimulation of antitumor immune-response. Based on its cytostatic, pro-apoptotic and antiproliferative functions, IFN-γ is considered potentially useful for adjuvant immunotherapy for different types of cancer. Moreover, it IFN-γ may inhibit angiogenesis in tumor tissue, induce regulatory T-cell apoptosis, and/or stimulate the activity of M1 proinflammatory macrophages to overcome tumor progression. However, the current understanding of the roles of IFN-γ in the tumor microenvironment (TME) may be misleading in terms of its clinical application. Main body Some researchers believe it has anti-tumorigenic properties, while others suggest that it contributes to tumor growth and progression. In our recent work, we have shown that concentration of IFN-γ in the TME determines its function. Further, it was reported that tumors treated with low-dose IFN-γ acquired metastatic properties while those infused with high dose led to tumor regression. Pro-tumorigenic role may be described through IFN-γ signaling insensitivity, downregulation of major histocompatibility complexes, upregulation of indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase, and checkpoint inhibitors such as programmed cell death ligand 1. Conclusion Significant research efforts are required to decipher IFN-γ-dependent pro- and anti-tumorigenic effects. This review discusses the current knowledge concerning the roles of IFN-γ in the TME as a part of the complex immune response to cancer and highlights the importance of identifying IFN-γ responsive patients to improve their sensitivity to immuno-therapies.


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