Abstract
The visual color-word Stroop task is widely used in clinical and research settings as a measure of cognitive control. Numerous neuroimaging studies have used color-word Stroop tasks to investigate the neural resources supporting cognitive control, but to our knowledge all have used unimodal (typically visual) Stroop paradigms. Thus, it is possible that this classic measure of cognitive control is not capturing the resources involved in multisensory cognitive control. The audiovisual integration and crossmodal correspondence literatures identify regions sensitive to congruency of auditory and visual stimuli, but it is unclear how these regions relate to the unimodal cognitive control literature. In this study we aimed to identify brain regions engaged by crossmodal cognitive control during an audiovisual color-word Stroop task, and how they relate to previous unimodal Stroop and audiovisual integration findings. First, we replicated previous behavioral audiovisual Stroop findings in an fMRI-adapted audiovisual Stroop paradigm: incongruent visual information increased reaction time towards an auditory stimulus and congruent visual information decreased reaction time. Second, we investigated the brain regions supporting cognitive control during an audiovisual color-word Stroop task using fMRI. Similar to unimodal cognitive control tasks, a left superior parietal region exhibited an interference effect of visual information on the auditory stimulus. This superior parietal region was also identified using a standard audiovisual integration localizing procedure, indicating that audiovisual integration resources are sensitive to cognitive control demands. Facilitation of the auditory stimulus by congruent visual information was found in posterior superior temporal cortex, including in the posterior STS which has been found to support audiovisual integration. The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, often implicated in unimodal Stroop tasks, was not modulated by the audiovisual Stroop task. Overall the findings indicate that an audiovisual color-word Stroop task engages overlapping resources with audiovisual integration and overlapping but distinct resources compared to unimodal Stroop tasks.
Highlights
The human brain is capable of selectively attending to pertinent information, concurrently ignoring or inhibiting irrelevant information, overriding automatic responses, and correcting errors
The current study aims to characterize the brain regions engaged in an audiovisual colorword Stroop task to help answer two questions: (1) does audiovisual cognitive control recruit the same visual cognitive control regions previously identified with the widely used colorword Stroop task? And (2) are the cortical regions known to be modulated by AV integration and crossmodal correspondence sensitive to audiovisual cognitive control demands in the color-word Stroop task? Answering these questions will provide important insights into the nature of the cognitive control processes that are assessed by the widely-used color-word Stroop task, and help to bridge the AV integration, crossmodal correspondence, and cognitive control literatures
Superior parietal regions frequently implicated in unimodal Stroop tasks and attention more generally were more responsive to AV stimuli than unimodal stimuli and exhibited an interference effect when incongruent visual information was presented alongside the auditory stimulus
Summary
The human brain is capable of selectively attending to pertinent information, concurrently ignoring or inhibiting irrelevant information, overriding automatic responses, and correcting errors These specific abilities are referred to as cognitive control and have been the focus of dozens of research studies over the last several decades (for reviews see [1,2,3,4]). In incongruent Stroop trials, there is a mismatch between the meaning of the word and the font color (e.g. the word “red” presented in blue ink), resulting in increased reaction times and decreased accuracy (i.e. interference) compared to identifying the font color of a neutral word [5,6,7,8,9,10,11]
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