IMPACT OF MINDFULNESS BASED COGNITIVE THERAPY ON RESPONSE INHIBITION IN ADULTS WITH OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER

Background: 1. Aim: The present study attempts to see the impact of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy on response inhibition ability in adults with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) Methods and Materials: MBCT was applied on Pre- and post-assessments as intervention with a control group design were used to conduct this study including 34 patients with OCD. Clients were equally distributed in two groups where one group was given intervention Mindfulness based cognitive therapy (MBCT) sessions for 8 weeks. Pre- and post- intervention assessment was done using The Stroop Color and Word Test (SCWT) and the results were compared. Results: Obtained research data indicates that there was no signicant in the stroop effect between the group which had been undergone MBCT as compared to the other group. Conclusion: Findings revealed that MBCT did not had signicant effect on overall enhancement of stroop effect in adults with OCD

Selective reinforcement of conflict processing in the Stroop task

Motivation signals have been shown to influence the engagement of cognitive control processes. However, most studies focus on the invigorating effect of reward prospect, rather than the reinforcing effect of reward feedback. The present study aimed to test whether people strategically adapt conflict processing when confronted with condition-specific congruency-reward contingencies in a manual Stroop task. Results show that the size of the Stroop effect can be affected by selectively rewarding responses following incongruent versus congruent trials. However, our findings also suggest important boundary conditions. Our first two experiments only show a modulation of the Stroop effect in the first half of the experimental blocks, possibly due to our adaptive threshold procedure demotivating adaptive behavior over time. The third experiment showed an overall modulation of the Stroop effect, but did not find evidence for a similar modulation on test items, leaving open whether this effect generalizes to the congruency conditions, or is stimulus-specific. More generally, our results are consistent with computational models of cognitive control and support contemporary learning perspectives on cognitive control. The findings also offer new guidelines and directions for future investigations on the selective reinforcement of cognitive control processes.

In search of blue-light effects on cognitive control

People are constantly exposed to blue light while engaging in work. It is thus crucial to understand if vast exposure to blue light influences cognitive control, which is essential for working efficiently. Previous studies proposed that the stimulation of intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs), a newly discovered photoreceptor that is highly sensitive to blue light, could modulate non-image forming functions. Despite studies that showed blue light (or ipRGCs) enhances brain activations in regions related to cognitive control, how exposure to blue light changes our cognitive control behaviorally remains elusive. We examined whether blue light influences cognitive control through three behavioral tasks in three studies: the sustained attention to response task (SART), the task-switching paradigm, and the Stroop task. Classic effects of the SART, switch cost, and the Stroop effect were found, but no differences were observed in results of different background lights across the six experiments. Together, we conclude that these domains of cognitive control are not influenced by blue light and ipRGCs, and whether the enhancement of blue light on brain activities extends to the behavioral level should be carefully re-examined.

Effectiveness of Mobile Technology in Managing Fatigue: Balert App

The performance of professional tasks with a high cognitive, emotional, and even physiological demand, can cause a state of mental fatigue, which implies attentional alterations, greater errors in the tasks performed and a decrease in personal and work productivity caused by a deterioration of the cognitive control processes. The present study presents a mobile phone application named BAlert that allows monitoring and controlling the body's fatigue processes based on the scores obtained in the Stroop effect and the heart rate variability. A pilot study has been carried out with a sample of 63 adults who have used the application a total of 942 times. The results allow us to classify the subjects, by logistic regression analysis, in their fatigue levels in 74% of the occasions. These results highlight the importance of this mobile application to control work fatigue processes in different possible scenarios (military, health, sports, business, etc.).

Intermodal Priming of Cognitive Conflict? A Failed Replication of Mager et al. (2009)

Introduction: The present study was conducted to verify a promising experimental setup which demonstrated an inversed Stroop-effect (much faster responses for incongruent relative to congruent Stroop trials) following a mismatching tone. In the matching condition, which was an almost exact replication of the original study, participants were required to indicate whether word color and word meaning were matching, whereas in the response conflict condition, instruction was the same as in a classical Stroop task and required the participants to respond to the word color. As in the original study, each trial was preceded by a sine tone which was deviant in pitch in 20% of the trials.Results: The main result was that the Stroop effect was not inversed after deviant tones, neither under the matching task instruction nor under the response conflict task instruction. The Stroop effect was unaffected by the previous “conceptual mismatch.”Conclusion: The current study failed to replicate the astonishing concept of “conflict priming” reported in previous work and does not open the doors for a new window on sequences of conflicts. Nevertheless, the failed replication is valuable for future research, since it demonstrated that “Conflict Priming” as a facilitation of processing of conflict trials following deviant tones, is not an confirmed finding.