Telephone Conversations Affect the Executive but not the Alerting or Orienting Network

Previous work has shown that talking on a mobile phone leads to an impairment of visual attention. Gunnell et al. (2020) investigated the locus of these dual-task impairments and found that although phone conversations led to cognitive delays in response times, other mechanisms underlying particular selective attention tasks were unaffected. Here we investigated which attentional networks, if any, were impaired by having a phone conversation. We used the Attentional Network Task (ANT) to evaluate performance of the alerting, orienting and executive attentional networks, both in conditions where people were engaged in a conversation and where they were silent. Two experiments showed that there was a robust delay in response across all three networks. However, at the individual network level, holding a conversation did not influence the size of the alerting or orienting effects but it did reduce the size of the conflict effect within the executive network. The findings suggest that holding a conversation can reduce the overall speed of responding and, via its influence on the executive network, can reduce the amount of information that can be processed from the environment.

Positive emotion enhances conflict processing in preschoolers

The rapid detection and resolution of conflict between opposing action tendencies is crucial for our ability to engage in goal-directed behavior. Research in adults suggests that emotions might serve as a ‘relevance detector’ that alarms attentional and sensory systems, thereby leading to more efficient conflict processing. In contrast, previous research in children has almost exclusively stressed the impeding influence of emotion on the attentional system, as suggested by the protracted development of performance in ‘hot’ executive function tasks. How does emotion modulate conflict processing in development? We addressed this question applying a modified version of a color flanker task that either involved or did not involve emotional stimuli in preschool children (N = 43, with preregistered Bayesian sequential design, aged 2.8 – 7.0 years). Our results show a robust conflict effect with higher error rates in incongruent compared to congruent trials. Crucially, conflict resolution was faster in emotional compared to neutral conditions. Furthermore, while efficient conflict processing increases with age, we find evidence against an age-related change in the influence of emotion on conflict processing. Taken together, these findings provide first indication that emotion can trigger efficient control processes already from early on in life. In contrast to previous findings and theories in developmental psychology, this indicates that, depending on the role that emotion has in conflict processing, emotion may show a facilitative or impeding effect.

Parsing the Neural Mechanisms of Short-Term and Long-Term Associations in the Flanker Tasks: An ERP Analysis

The neural mechanisms of cognitive conflicts within various flanker tasks are still unclear, which may be mixed with different effects of short-term associations and long-term associations. We applied a perceptual (color) flanker task and a symbolic (arrow) flanker task to 25 healthy young adults, while the event-related potentials (ERP) and behavioral performance were recorded. The former contains stimulus-stimulus conflict (SSC) of short-term memory (STM) associations, and the latter contains stimulus-response conflict (SRC) of long-term memory (LTM) associations. Both flanker tasks included congruent and incongruent conditions. The reaction time demonstrated the stimulus-response conflict effect in the arrow flanker task without the stimulus-stimulus conflict effect in the color flanker task. The ERP results showed SSC enhanced the frontocentral N2b without behavioral effects. SRC increased the frontocentral P2 but decreased the centroparietal P3b with prolonged reaction time. In the comparison between both tasks, the color flanker task elicited both the centroparietal N2b/N300 and the frontocentral N400, and the arrow flanker task increased the occipital N1. Our findings provide new evidence that different neural mechanisms underlie conflict effects based on different types of memory associations.

8-Substituted Triazolobenzodiazepines: In Vitro and In Vivo Pharmacology in Relation to Structural Docking at the α1 Subunit-Containing GABAA Receptor

In order to develop improved anxiolytic drugs, 8-substituted analogs of triazolam were synthesized in an effort to discover compounds with selectivity for α2/α3 subunit-containing GABAA subtypes. Two compounds in this series, XLi-JY-DMH (6-(2-chlorophenyl)-8-ethynyl-1-methyl-4H-benzo [f][1,2,4]triazolo[4,3-a][1,4]diazepine) and SH-TRI-108 [(E)-8-ethynyl-1-methyl-6-(pyridin-2-yl)-4H-benzo [f][1,2,4]triazolo[4,3-a][1,4]diazepine], were evaluated for in vitro and in vivo properties associated with GABAA subtype-selective ligands. In radioligand binding assays conducted in transfected HEK cells containing rat αXβ3γ2 subtypes (X = 1,2,3,5), no evidence of selectivity was obtained, although differences in potency relative to triazolam were observed overall (triazolam > XLi-JY-DMH > SH-TRI-108). In studies with rat αXβ3γ2 subtypes (X = 1,2,3,5) using patch-clamp electrophysiology, no differences in maximal potentiation of GABA-mediated Cl− current was obtained across subtypes for any compound. However, SH-TRI-108 demonstrated a 25-fold difference in functional potency between α1β3γ2 vs. α2β3γ2 subtypes. We evaluated the extent to which this potency difference translated into behavioral pharmacological differences in monkeys. In a rhesus monkey conflict model of anxiolytic-like effects, triazolam, XLi-JY-DMH, and SH-TR-108 increased rates of responding attenuated by shock (anti-conflict effect) but also attenuated non-suppressed responding. In a squirrel monkey observation procedure, both analogs engendered a profile of sedative-motor effects similar to that reported previously for triazolam. In molecular docking studies, we found that the interactions of the 8-ethynyl triazolobenzodiazepines with the C-loop of the α1GABAA site was stronger than that of imidazodiazepines XHe-II-053 and HZ-166, which may account for the non-sedating yet anxiolytic profile of these latter compounds when evaluated in previous studies.

The effects of direct current stimulation and random noise stimulation on attention networks

Attention is a complex cognitive process that selects specific stimuli for further processing. Previous research suggested the existence of three attentional networks: alerting, orienting and executive. However, one important topic is how to enhance the efficiency of attentional networks. In this context, understanding how this system behaves under two different modulatory conditions, namely transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and transcranial Random Noise Stimulation (tRNS), will provide important insights towards the understanding of the attention network system. Twenty-seven healthy students took part on a randomized single-blinded crossover study, testing the effects that involved three modalities of unilateral stimulation (tRNS, anodal tDCS, and sham) over the DLPFC, during the performance of the attention network test (ANT) in three different conditions: standard, speed and accuracy. Results showed that tRNS was able to increase attention during more complex situations, namely by increasing alerting and decreasing conflict effect in the executive network. Under the Speed condition, tRNS increased efficiency of the alerting network, as well as under the more demanding conflict network, tRNS overall increased the performance when comparing to sham. No statistical significant effects of tDCS were observed. These results are compatible with the attention requiring the synchronization of pre-existing networks, rather the reinforcement or creation of new pathways.

The sensitivity to context modulates executive control: Evidence from Malayalam–English bilinguals

In two experiments, we examined the hypothesis that bilingual speakers modulate their cognitive control settings dynamically in the presence of different interlocutors, and this can be captured through performance on a non-linguistic attention task. We introduced Malayalam–English bilinguals to interlocutors with varying L2 dominance through a pre-experiment familiarisation and interaction phase. Later, participants did the Flanker task while the interlocutors appeared before each trial. While in experiment one participants did the Flanker task with equal distribution of trials, in experiment two we manipulated the monitoring demands by changing the frequency of trials. Results showed that high-L2 proficient bilinguals had lower conflict effect on the Flanker task in the presence of balanced interlocutors in both the experiments. The results provide strong evidence of dynamic adaptation of control settings in bilinguals with regard to different passively present interlocutors. The results further extend the predictions of the adaptive control hypothesis with novel manipulation.

Attention Networks in ADHD Adults after Working Memory Training with a Dual n-Back Task

Patients affected by Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are characterized by impaired executive functioning and/or attention deficits. Our study aim is to determine whether the outcomes measured by the Attention Network Task (ANT), i.e., the reaction times (RTs) to specific target and cue conditions and alerting, orienting, and conflict (or executive control) effects are affected by cognitive training with a Dual n-back task. We considered three groups of young adult participants: ADHD patients without medication (ADHD), ADHD with medication (MADHD), and age/education-matched controls. Working memory training consisted of a daily practice of 20 blocks of Dual n-back task (approximately 30 min per day) for 20 days within one month. Participants of each group were randomly assigned into two subgroups, the first one with an adaptive mode of difficulty (adaptive training), while the second was blocked at the level 1 during the whole training phase (1-back task, baseline training). Alerting and orienting effects were not modified by working memory training. The dimensional analysis showed that after baseline training, the lesser the severity of the hyperactive-impulsive symptoms, the larger the improvement of reaction times on trials with high executive control/conflict demand (i.e., what is called Conflict Effect), irrespective of the participants’ group. In the categorical analysis, we observed the improvement in such Conflict Effect after the adaptive training in adult ADHD patients irrespective of their medication, but not in controls. The ex-Gaussian analysis of RT and RT variability showed that the improvement in the Conflict Effect correlated with a decrease in the proportion of extreme slow responses. The Dual n-back task in the adaptive mode offers as a promising candidate for a cognitive remediation of adult ADHD patients without pharmaceutical medication.

A model-based approach to disentangling facilitation and interference effects in conflict tasks

Conflict tasks have become one of the most dominant paradigms within cognitive psychology, with their key finding being the conflict effect: that participants are slower and less accurate when task-irrelevant information conflicts with task-relevant information (i.e., incompatible trials), compared to when these sources of information are consistent (i.e., compatible trials). However, the conflict effect can consist of two separate effects: facilitation effects, which is the amount of benefit provided by consistent task-irrelevant information, and interference effects, which is the amount of impairment caused by conflicting task-irrelevant information. While previous studies have attempted to disentangle these effects using neutral trials, which contrast compatible and incompatible trials to trials that are designed to have neutral task-irrelevant information, these analyses rely on the assumptions of Donder’s subtractive method, which are difficult to verify and may be violated in some circumstances. Here, we develop a model-based approach for disentangling facilitation and interference effects, which extends the existing diffusion model for conflict tasks (DMC) framework to allow for different levels of automatic activation in compatible and incompatible trials. Comprehensive parameter recovery assessments display the robust measurement properties of our model-based approach, which we apply to 9 previous data sets from the flanker (6) and Simon (3) tasks. Our findings suggest asymmetric facilitation and interference effects, where interference effects appear to be present for most participants across most studies, whereas facilitation effects appear to be small or non-existent. We believe that our novel model-based approach provides an important step forward for understanding how information processing operates in conflict tasks, allowing researchers to assess the convergence or divergence between experimental-based (i.e., neutral trials) and model-based approaches when investigating facilitation and interference effects.

Reliability and Convergence of Conflict Effects

Recent work in attentional control has suggested that conflict effects measured across different tasks are not reliable and by extension unrelated. The lack of correlation between these conflict effects is in juxtaposition not only to theoretical predictions of a domain-general attentional control mechanism but also to a large body of individual differences research that has used these tasks to show evidence for an attentional control construct and its relatedness to other psychological constructs. In an effort to address this, we fit hierarchical models to each task that modeled trial-to-trial variability in response times to assess the extent to which the parameter estimates for the conflict effect correlated across tasks. We compared this method of assessing shared variance to more traditional summed difference score estimates of the conflict effect by analyzing data from a large-scale individual differences experiment, in which N = 582 subjects completed a Stroop, Flanker, and Simon task. Across tasks, we found that while the reliability of the conflict was sufficiently high and the between-task conflict effect significantly correlated, the magnitude of the between-task correlation was low. We discuss the implications of these results as providing more support for a domain-specific than domain-general attentional control mechanism.

The Influence of Ethnoreligious Conflict Effect on Student's Learning Motivation in North Halmahera

The conflict in North Halmahera affects various aspects of community life there. This study aims to find out the influence of ethnoreligious conflict effect on student’s learning motivation in North Halmahera. The sample of this study were students in North Halmahera who was studying at the higher education level. Samples taken as many as 39 people based on a purposive sampling technique. The data were collected using two scales: trauma scale and learning motivation scale. The conclusion from the results of this study is that students from North Halmahera who experienced trauma have wrong learning motivation. This can be seen from the description of trauma measurements that give the results of most (56%) North Halmahera students who study in higher education are in the moderate trauma category, 23% are in the high trauma category, and 21% are in the very high trauma category. On learning motivation, the measurement description results as much as 44% are at a high category, 28% are in the medium category, 23% in the very high category, and 5% in the low category.