Differences in brain activity between fast and slow responses on psychomotor vigilance task: an fNIRS study.

Mateus G Nogueira,Abrahão F Baptista,Mateus Silvestrin,João Ricardo Sato,Rickson C Mesquita,Cândida S F Barreto,Claudinei Biazoli

doi:10.1007/s11682-021-00611-8

Mateus G Nogueira, Abrahão F Baptista + Show 5 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-021-00611-8

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Abstract

Attention is a basic human function underlying every other cognitive process. It is demonstrated in the functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging literature that frontoparietal networks are involved with attentive performance while default mode networks are involved with inattentive performance. Yet, it is still not clear whether similar results would be found with functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy. The goal of our study was to investigate differences in hemodynamic activity measured by functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy between fast and slow responses on a simple sustained attention task both before and after stimulus onset. Thirty healthy adults took part in the study. Our results have shown differences between fast and slow responses only on channels over medial frontal cortex and inferior parietal cortex (p < 0,05). These differences were observed both before and after stimulus presentation. It is discussed that functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy is a good tool to investigate the frontoparietal network and its relationship with performance in attention tasks; it could be used to further investigate other approaches on attention, such as the dual network model of cognitive control and brain states views based on complex systems analysis; and finally, it could be used to investigate attention in naturalistic settings.

Highlights

Sustained attention (SA) refers to the maintenance of engagement in a specific task for long periods of time (Fortenbaugh et al, 2017)
Attention is a basic human function underlying every other cognitive process. It is demonstrated in the functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging literature that frontoparietal networks are involved with attentive performance while default mode networks are involved with inattentive performance
We found differences between fast responses and baseline mainly on a large portion of the parietal cortex, on the motor and premotor area, inferior frontal and medial frontal cortex (Figure 4)

Summary

Introduction

Sustained attention (SA) refers to the maintenance of engagement in a specific task for long periods of time (Fortenbaugh et al, 2017) It requires prolonged conscious effort of cognitive processing for at least ten seconds (Langner & Eickhoff, 2013). Because of its monotonous characteristics, simple tasks such as detection or discrimination tasks impose more demand on SA than tasks that require complex stimulus processing or high order executive function (Langner & Eickhoff, 2013) Both vigilance and tonic alertness can be considered synonyms for SA. The psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) is an example of a simple detection task that is used to assess SA It was originally proposed by (Dinges & Powell, 1985) as a tool to investigate the effects of sleep deprivation on performance during sustained operation. Researchers have employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during PVT to investigate brain patterns associated with autism and obsessive-compulsive disorder (Carlisi et al, 2017), post traumatic brain injury fatigue (Nordin et al, 2016) , and neuropsychology evaluation on workers during night shifts (Jaipurkar et al, 2019; McHill & Wright, 2019)

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