Abstract

Proactive control allows us to maneuver a changing environment and individuals are distinct in how they anticipate and approach such changes. Here, we examined how individual differences in personality traits influence cerebral responses to conflict anticipation, a critical process of proactive control. We explored this issue in an fMRI study of the stop signal task, in which the probability of stop signal – p(Stop) – was computed trial by trial with a Bayesian model. Higher p(Stop) is associated with prolonged go trial reaction time, indicating conflict anticipation and proactive control of motor response. Regional brain activations to conflict anticipation were correlated to novelty seeking (NS), harm avoidance (HA), reward dependence, as assessed by the Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire, with age and gender as covariates, in a whole-brain linear regression. Results showed that increased anticipation of the stop signal is associated with activations in the bilateral inferior parietal lobules (IPL), right lateral orbitofrontal cortex (lOFC), middle frontal gyrus (MFG), anterior pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA), and bilateral thalamus, with men showing greater activation in the IPL than women. NS correlated negatively to activity in the anterior pre-SMA, right IPL, and MFG/lOFC, and HA correlated negatively to activity in the thalamus during conflict anticipation. In addition, the negative association between NS and MFG/lOFC activity was significant in men but not in women. Thus, NS and HA traits are associated with reduced mobilization of cognitive control circuits when enhanced behavioral control is necessary. The findings from this exploratory study characterize the influence of NS and HA on proactive control and provide preliminary evidence for gender differences in these associations.

Highlights

  • As heritable personality traits (Elliot and Thrash, 2002, 2010), approach and avoidance motivation may exert a strong influence on cognition (Cloninger, 1987; Carver et al, 2000; Elliot and Thrash, 2002)

  • Average go trial reaction time (GoRT) and stop signal reaction time (SSRT) were 634 ± 114 ms and 204 ± 42 ms, respectively. These measures are typical of stop signal task (SST) performance and suggest that participants’ performance was well tracked by the staircase procedure

  • Examination of the sequential effect – the correlation between Go RT and p(Stop) – showed that 73 of the 78 participants demonstrated a significant sequential effect (p < 0.05) with an average sequential effect of 0.33 ± 0.13. The latter finding suggested that conflict anticipation is associated with behavioral control

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Summary

Introduction

As heritable personality traits (Elliot and Thrash, 2002, 2010), approach and avoidance motivation may exert a strong influence on cognition (Cloninger, 1987; Carver et al, 2000; Elliot and Thrash, 2002). In an eventrelated potential study, individuals with higher threat-sensitivity displayed greater N2 to happy relative to fearful NoGo faces, suggesting that a mismatch between one’s temperament and the valence of the NoGo stimulus elevates the need for cognitive control (Pornpattananangkul et al, 2015). These studies suggest a relationship between approach/avoidance traits and cerebral responses during cognitive control in reward or emotion related contingencies, the extant findings do not allow a clear conclusion as to how these personality traits modulate cerebral responses to support behavior. It remains unclear whether or how the influence of approach/avoidance traits extends to cognitive motor control that does not explicitly implicate reward or affect processing

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