Abstract
Cognitive control warrants efficient task performance in dynamic and changing environments through adjustments in executive attention, stimulus and response selection. The well-known P300 component of the human event-related potential (ERP) has long been proposed to index “context-updating”—critical for cognitive control—in simple target detection tasks. However, task switching ERP studies have revealed both target P3 (300–350 ms) and later sustained P3-like potentials (400–1,200 ms) to first targets ensuing transition cues, although it remains unclear whether these target P3-like potentials also reflect context updating operations. To address this question, we applied novel single-trial EEG analyses—residue iteration decomposition (RIDE)—in order to disentangle target P3 sub-components in a sample of 22 young adults while they either repeated or switched (updated) task rules. The rationale was to revise the context updating hypothesis of P300 elicitation in the light of new evidence suggesting that “the context” consists of not only the sensory units of stimulation, but also associated motor units, and intermediate low- and high-order sensorimotor units, all of which may need to be dynamically updated on a trial by trial basis. The results showed functionally distinct target P3-like potentials in stimulus-locked, response-locked, and intermediate RIDE component clusters overlying parietal and frontal regions, implying multiple functionally distinct, though temporarily overlapping context updating operations. These findings support a reformulated version of the context updating hypothesis, and reveal a rich family of distinct target P3-like sub-components during the reactive control of target detection in task-switching, plausibly indexing the complex and dynamic workings of frontoparietal cortical networks subserving cognitive control.
Highlights
Cognitive control refers to a group of processes associated with the allocation of attentional resources in order to optimize behavioral performance whilst minimizing interference from distracting information (Botvinick et al, 2001; Gratton et al, 2018), and is associated with neural activation of a distributed frontoparietal cortical network (Niendam et al, 2012)
This double dissociation of frontoparietal P3-like positivities in cued task-switching was partly consistent with the original context-updating hypothesis of P300 derived from oddball target detection tasks (Donchin and Coles, 1988; Polich, 2007), it highlighted the importance of the temporal context, and of the ongoing task context, to fully account for the richness of cue-locked P3 and targetlocked P3 modulations seen across frontoparietal scalp regions (Barceló and Cooper, 2018)
Target P3 amplitudes were larger for target 1 than target 3 trials at both sites [main effect of target trial F(1, 21) = 19.87, p < 0.001, η2p = 0.49, BF10 = 919.61, posterior probability > 0.99], these trial differences were significantly larger at Fz [t(21) = 5.07, p < 0.001] than at Pz [t(21) = 2.35, p = 0.028]
Summary
Cognitive control refers to a group of processes associated with the allocation of attentional resources in order to optimize behavioral performance whilst minimizing interference from distracting information (Botvinick et al, 2001; Gratton et al, 2018), and is associated with neural activation of a distributed frontoparietal cortical network (Niendam et al, 2012). The other P3 family was elicited by temporarily predictable target events, and provided a relatively pure index of reactive control of stimulus-response selection at target onset (i.e., stimulus targetness) This double dissociation of frontoparietal P3-like positivities in cued task-switching was partly consistent with the original context-updating hypothesis of P300 derived from oddball target detection tasks (Donchin and Coles, 1988; Polich, 2007), it highlighted the importance of the temporal context (e.g., distinct proactive vs reactive control modes; Braver, 2012), and of the ongoing task context (and specially, the motor and sensorimotor demands; see Figure 1A), to fully account for the richness of cue-locked P3 and targetlocked P3 modulations seen across frontoparietal scalp regions (Barceló and Cooper, 2018). Though, to what extent proactive context-updating during the cue-target interval influenced reactive context-updating during subsequent target detection and classification, as indexed by target P3 potentials
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