Abstract
The present study provides a neurobiological framework to the theory of epistemic motivation that has been extensively studied for the last three decades in the domain of social cognition. Epistemic motivations affect the way people generate and validate hypotheses, and ultimately form and modify knowledge. Strong dispositional measures such as need for cognitive closure (NCC), the desire for a quick firm answer (any answer) to a question, show gross and stable inter-individual differences. The cognitive mechanisms and neural underpinnings of such differences, however, remain largely unexplored. Here we show that high (compared to low) levels of NCC, measured with need for cognitive closure scale, are associated with reduced online adjustment in cognitive control, as indexed by behavioral conflict adaptation. This behavioral effect is mediated by dynamic changes in cortico-cortical functional connectivity between prefrontal regions involved in conflict monitoring and implementation of cognitive control. In particular, these regions show increased functional connectivity after exposure to conflict in low but not high NCC individuals. These results demonstrate that the level of flexibility of functional cortico-cortical connections can mediate stable psychological dispositions.
Highlights
Dispositional constructs, including personality traits and stable motivational factors, have profound and pervasive effects on cognition and behavior [1,2]
On this basis and core definitional tendencies of need for cognitive closure (NCC) to ‘‘seeze’’ on early information and ‘‘freeze’’ upon the judgments it affords, we predict that individual levels of NCC are correlated with flexibility, both measured as online adjustment in cognitive control and as degree of functional cortico-cortical connections between the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC)
Need for Cognitive Closure Questionnaire NCC was measured with a short version of the Italian Need for Cognitive Closure scale devised by Pierro & Kruglanski [34]and already used in previous studies [35]
Summary
Dispositional constructs, including personality traits and stable motivational factors, have profound and pervasive effects on cognition and behavior [1,2]. Consistent with the conflict monitoring hypothesis, neuroimaging studies have shown that the behavioral adjustments in response to conflict detection such those observed in the congruence sequence effect are associated with a decrease of activity in the ACC and a subsequent increase of activity in the DLPFC [22,28] On this basis and core definitional tendencies of NCC to ‘‘seeze’’ on early information and ‘‘freeze’’ upon the judgments it affords, we predict that individual levels of NCC are correlated with flexibility, both measured as online adjustment in cognitive control and as degree of functional cortico-cortical connections between the ACC and DLPFC. To this aim participants with low and high NCC were administered the Eriksen flanker task [32]
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