Attentional Cognitive Control Research Articles

Adolescence Romantic Relationship and Executive Functions: Literature Review Regarding Attention Control and Academic Competence

In this article, I review the association between middle adolescent romantic relationships and cognitive control of attention. I identify the cognitive development in executive functions due to romantic love, which is found to be positive over the romantically stable period. I present the findings in both positive and negative aspects, as well as clarifying the relationship between increasing executive functions and academic or social competence. Finally, I propose a brief description of a feasible research plan on the correlation between adolescent romantic love and attention control, associating the mean reaction time in Task-switching.

Cholinergic Signaling Dynamics and Cognitive Control of Attention.

The central cholinergic system is one of the most important modulator neurotransmitter system implicated in diverse behavioral processes. Activation of the basal forebrain cortical cholinergic input system represents a critical step in cortical information processing. This chapter explores recent developments illustrating cortical cholinergic transmission mediate defined cognitive operations, which is contrary to the traditional view that acetylcholine acts as a slowly acting neuromodulator that influences arousal cortex-wide. Specifically, we review the evidence that phasic cholinergic signaling in the prefrontal cortex is a causal mediator of signal detection. In addition, studies that support the neuromodulatory role of cholinergic inputs in top-down attentional control are summarized. Finally, we review new findings that reveal sex differences and hormonal regulation of the cholinergic-attention system.

The Role of Cognitive Control in Tinnitus and Its Relation to Speech-in-Noise Performance.

Self-reported difficulties in speech-in-noise (SiN) recognition are common among tinnitus patients. Whereas hearing impairment that usually co-occurs with tinnitus can explain such difficulties, recent studies suggest that tinnitus patients with normal hearing sensitivity still show decreased SiN understanding, indicating that SiN difficulties cannot be solely attributed to changes in hearing sensitivity. In fact, cognitive control, which refers to a variety of top-down processes that human beings use to complete their daily tasks, has been shown to be critical for SiN recognition, as well as the key to understand cognitive inefficiencies caused by tinnitus. In this article, we review studies investigating the association between tinnitus and cognitive control using behavioral and brain imaging assessments, as well as those examining the effect of tinnitus on SiN recognition. In addition, three factors that can affect cognitive control in tinnitus patients, including hearing sensitivity, age, and severity of tinnitus, are discussed to elucidate the association among tinnitus, cognitive control, and SiN recognition. Although a possible central or cognitive involvement has always been postulated in the observed SiN impairments in tinnitus patients, there is as yet no direct evidence to underpin this assumption, as few studies have addressed both SiN performance and cognitive control in one tinnitus cohort. Future studies should aim at incorporating SiN tests with various subjective and objective methods that evaluate cognitive performance to better understand the relationship between SiN difficulties and cognitive control in tinnitus patients.

Cognitive control and midline theta adjust across multiple timescales

Cognitive control of attention in conflict situations is a basic skill that is vital for goal-oriented behavior. Behavioral evidence shows that conflict control occurs over successive trials as well as longer time scales of trial blocks, but the relation among time scales as well as their neural mechanisms are unclear. This study used measures of behavior, EEG, and a simple quantitative model to test the hypothesis that conflict control at the block level is not exclusively driven by control adjustments over successive trials. Young adults performed an auditory Simon task, and the base rate of compatible vs. incompatible trials was manipulated in separate blocks (25, 50, 75% compatible). EEG data were analyzed using independent component analysis (ICA) to define cortical mechanisms of any base rate and trial-by-trial sequence effects. Reaction time measures had both sequence and base rate effects. Two fronto-medial ICA components indexed sequence and base rate effects, with specific profiles for evoked potentials and oscillations in the theta and alpha frequency bands. Predictive modeling showed that sequence effects accounted for a minority of the variance on behavioral and ICA measures (all < 36%). The results strongly suggest that the base rate manipulation affected behavior and many neural measures beyond the influence of sequence effects.

Linguistic and Cognitive Effects of Bilingualism with Regional Minority Languages: A Study of Sardinian-Italian Adult Speakers.

This study explores the effects of bilingualism in Sardinian as a regional minority language on the linguistic competence in Italian as the dominant language and on non-linguistic cognitive abilities. Sardinian/Italian adult speakers and monolingual Italian speakers living in the same geographical area of Sardinia were compared in two kinds of tasks: (a) verbal and non-verbal cognitive tasks targeting working memory and attentional control and (b) tasks of linguistic abilities in Italian focused on the comprehension of sentences differing in grammatical complexity. Although no difference was found between bilinguals and monolinguals in the cognitive control of attention, bilinguals performed better on working memory tasks. Bilinguals with lower formal education were found to be faster at comprehension of one type of complex sentence (center embedded object relative clauses). In contrast, bilinguals and monolinguals with higher education showed comparable slower processing of complex sentences. These results show that the effects of bilingualism are modulated by type of language experience and education background: positive effects of active bilingualism on the dominant language are visible in bilinguals with lower education, whereas the effects of higher literacy in Italian obliterate those of active bilingualism in bilinguals and monolinguals with higher education.

COMT and DRD2/ANKK-1 gene-gene interaction account for resetting of gamma neural oscillations to auditory stimulus-driven attention.

Attention capture by potentially relevant environmental stimuli is critical for human survival, yet it varies considerably among individuals. A large series of studies has suggested that attention capture may depend on the cognitive balance between maintenance and manipulation of mental representations and the flexible switch between goal-directed representations and potentially relevant stimuli outside the focus of attention; a balance that seems modulated by a prefrontostriatal dopamine pathway. Here, we examined inter-individual differences in the cognitive control of attention through studying the effects of two single nucleotide polymorphisms regulating dopamine at the prefrontal cortex and the striatum (i.e., COMTMet108/158Val and ANKK1/DRD2TaqIA) on stimulus-driven attention capture. Healthy adult participants (N = 40) were assigned to different groups according to the combination of the polymorphisms COMTMet108/158Val and ANKK1/DRD2TaqIA, and were instructed to perform on a well-established distraction protocol. Performance in individuals with a balance between prefrontal dopamine display and striatal receptor density was slowed down by the occurrence of unexpected distracting events, while those with a rather unbalanced dopamine activity were able maintain task performance with no time delay, yet at the expense of a slightly lower accuracy. This advantage, associated to their distinct genetic profiles, was paralleled by an electrophysiological mechanism of phase-resetting of gamma neural oscillation to the novel, distracting events. Taken together, the current results suggest that the epistatic interaction between COMTVal108/158Met and ANKK1/DRD2 TaqIa genetic polymorphisms lies at the basis of stimulus-driven attention capture.

El desarrollo de la inteligencia emocional a través de la optimización de las capacidades cognitivas a través de la educación obligatoria

Desde que la Inteligencia Emocional (IE) fue desarrollada en 1990 (Salovey y Mayer, 1990), era cuestión de tiempo que se desarrollaran aplicaciones como en la educación, entre otros. De hecho, proliferaron programas específicos de IE, de menor temporalidad y de complicada incardinación en los proyectos de centro. Sin embargo, hay una alternativa a realizarlo de forma inespecífica y de mayor duración y viabilidad. El presente trabajo se basa en una propuesta teórica como base para el desarrollo de la IE en la educación obligatoria. Partiendo del modelo cognitivo de habilidades mentales de Cattell-Horn-Carroll, se observa que las capacidades que son fomentadas en la educación obligatoria son las mismas que se observan en el segundo estrato del modelo; además trabajos recientes (véase Mestre, MacCann, Guil y Roberts, 2016) han señalado que dichas capacidades del segundo estrato están conectadas a las capacidades de la IE. Por consiguiente, toda actividad educativa que optimice la percepción, la comprensión, el control atencional o la planificación cognitiva está incidiendo en el desarrollo de la IE. Para ello, se insta a utilizar de forma transversal la introducción de información “hot” –aquella con significado existencial para un sujeto– en el contenido de las asignaturas (Mayer, Caruso y Salovey, 2016). Las asignaturas de ciencias y ciencias naturales favorecen el desarrollo de la percepción consciente y precisa, incluida de las emociones. Por su parte, las ciencias sociales y las humanidades fomentan la comprensión. Finalmente, las diferentes contingencias que se producen en la vida escolar son escenarios idóneos para el entrenamiento de la regulación de las emociones.

The Stroop effect at 80: The competition between stimulus control and cognitive control.

For more than 80 years, researchers have examined the interference between automatic processing of stimuli, such as the meaning of color words, on performance of a controlled-processing task such as naming the color in which words are printed. The Stroop effect and its many variations provide an ideal test platform for examining the competition between stimulus control and cognitive control of attention, as reflected in behavior. The two experiments reported here show that rhesus monkeys, like human adults, show interference from incongruous stimulus conditions in a number-Stroop task, and that the monkeys may be particularly susceptible to influence from response strength and less able, relative to human adults, of using executive attention to minimize this interference.

Large-Scale Network Dysfunction in Major Depressive Disorder: A Meta-analysis of Resting-State Functional Connectivity.

Major depressive disorder (MDD) has been linked to imbalanced communication among large-scale brain networks, as reflected by abnormal resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC). However, given variable methods and results across studies, identifying consistent patterns of network dysfunction in MDD has been elusive. To investigate network dysfunction in MDD through a meta-analysis of rsFC studies. Seed-based voxelwise rsFC studies comparing individuals with MDD with healthy controls (published before June 30, 2014) were retrieved from electronic databases (PubMed, Web of Science, and EMBASE) and authors contacted for additional data. Twenty-seven seed-based voxel-wise rsFC data sets from 25 publications (556 individuals with MDD and 518 healthy controls) were included in the meta-analysis. Coordinates of seed regions of interest and between-group effects were extracted. Seeds were categorized into seed-networks by their location within a priori functional networks. Multilevel kernel density analysis of between-group effects identified brain systems in which MDD was associated with hyperconnectivity (increased positive or reduced negative connectivity) or hypoconnectivity (increased negative or reduced positive connectivity) with each seed-network. Major depressive disorder was characterized by hypoconnectivity within the frontoparietal network, a set of regions involved in cognitive control of attention and emotion regulation, and hypoconnectivity between frontoparietal systems and parietal regions of the dorsal attention network involved in attending to the external environment. Major depressive disorder was also associated with hyperconnectivity within the default network, a network believed to support internally oriented and self-referential thought, and hyperconnectivity between frontoparietal control systems and regions of the default network. Finally, the MDD groups exhibited hypoconnectivity between neural systems involved in processing emotion or salience and midline cortical regions that may mediate top-down regulation of such functions. Reduced connectivity within frontoparietal control systems and imbalanced connectivity between control systems and networks involved in internal or external attention may reflect depressive biases toward internal thoughts at the cost of engaging with the external world. Meanwhile, altered connectivity between neural systems involved in cognitive control and those that support salience or emotion processing may relate to deficits regulating mood. These findings provide an empirical foundation for a neurocognitive model in which network dysfunction underlies core cognitive and affective abnormalities in depression.

Enhanced visual detection in trait anxiety.

There is much evidence suggesting that trait anxiety is associated with impairments in the cognitive control of attention. Recent findings, though, have suggested that anxiety may also influence perception, conversely enhancing early information processing. The present study investigated this claim within a visual detection task. Participants searched for a target letter among a number of nontarget letters, varied to modulate the demands or load on perception, while also reporting whether an additional stimulus appeared on trials. Self-reported trait anxiety levels did not affect performance in the letter search task under any level of load. However, visual detection for the additional stimulus, as measured by d' sensitivity, was positively correlated with levels of anxiety regardless of the perceptual difficulty of the search task. These results suggest that trait vulnerability to anxiety is associated with improved visual detection, providing direct evidence that anxiety may modulate sensory processing.

Resting state functional connectivity in early blind humans.

Task-based neuroimaging studies in early blind humans (EB) have demonstrated heightened visual cortex responses to non-visual paradigms. Several prior functional connectivity studies in EB have shown altered connections consistent with these task-based results. But these studies generally did not consider behavioral adaptations to lifelong blindness typically observed in EB. Enhanced cognitive abilities shown in EB include greater serial recall and attention to memory. Here, we address the question of the extent to which brain intrinsic activity in EB reflects such adaptations. We performed a resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging study contrasting 14 EB with 14 age/gender matched normally sighted controls (NS). A principal finding was markedly greater functional connectivity in EB between visual cortex and regions typically associated with memory and cognitive control of attention. In contrast, correlations between visual cortex and non-deprived sensory cortices were significantly lower in EB. Thus, the available data, including that obtained in prior task-based and resting state fMRI studies, as well as the present results, indicate that visual cortex in EB becomes more heavily incorporated into functional systems instantiating episodic recall and attention to non-visual events. Moreover, EB appear to show a reduction in interactions between visual and non-deprived sensory cortices, possibly reflecting suppression of inter-sensory distracting activity.

Cognitive control of attention is differentially affected in trauma-exposed individuals with and without post-traumatic stress disorder

This study aimed to determine whether patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) show difficulty in recruitment of the regions of the frontal and parietal cortex implicated in top-down attentional control in the presence and absence of emotional distracters. Unmedicated individuals with PTSD (n = 14), and age-, IQ- and gender-matched individuals exposed to trauma (n = 15) and healthy controls (n = 19) were tested on the affective number Stroop task. In addition, blood oxygen level-dependent responses, as measured via functional magnetic resonance imaging, were recorded. Patients with PTSD showed disrupted recruitment of lateral regions of the superior and inferior frontal cortex as well as the parietal cortex in the presence of negative distracters. Trauma-comparison individuals showed indications of a heightened ability to recruit fronto-parietal regions implicated in top-down attentional control across distracter conditions. These results are consistent with suggestions that emotional responsiveness can interfere with the recruitment of regions implicated in top-down attentional control; the heightened emotional responding of patients with PTSD may lead to the heightened interference in the recruitment of these regions.

Studying Irritability Was Frustrating—Until Now

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Clinical & Research NewsFull AccessStudying Irritability Was Frustrating—Until NowAaron LevinAaron LevinSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:16 Mar 2012https://doi.org/10.1176/pn.47.6.psychnews_47_6_18-aAbstractIrritability annoys researchers and clinicians.“Understanding irritability can help us understand high rates of comorbidity,” said Christen Deveney, Ph.D., a postdoctoral student in the Section on Bipolar Spectrum Disorders at NIMH. Deveney studies children with severe mood dysregulation who exhibit frustration in experimental conditions.Aaron LevinWhile it is a common symptom, irritability is also seriously understudied, Christen Deveney, Ph.D., told listeners last December at a lecture at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.Deveney noted that irritability is a criterion for many diagnoses: bipolar disorder, depression, oppositional defiant disorder, anxiety disorders, pervasive developmental disorders, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and conduct disorder and is an associated feature of other disorders.“There’s a great deal of overlap, so understanding irritability can help us understand high rates of comorbidity,” said Deveney.Current National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) research domain criteria call for focusing on specific symptoms—like irritability—to increase understanding of the underlying neurobiology of very complex heterogeneous psychiatric disorders.Irritability is a low threshold for experiencing frustration, which is defined as a negative affect in response to blocked goal attainment, said Deveney, a postdoctoral student in Ellen Leibenluft, M.D.’s lab in the Section on Bipolar Spectrum Disorders at NIMH.As any parent knows, frustration is a normal part of development and can help a child learn to cope with the surrounding world. Children with impairing levels of irritability, however, frequently develop depression and anxiety later, said Deveney. Irritability also plays a pivotal role in the controversy over the diagnosis of bipolar disorder in young people and so has major diagnostic and treatment implications.The Problem: ‘Kids Wise Up’However, designing experiments to study frustration and irritability in the lab is challenging. Tests must keep children engaged long enough to accumulate data, an especially tricky problem when scanning the subject’s brain.“It’s hard to get an adequate number of trials, because kids wise up.” said Deveney.There are ethical issues too, since the tests involve deception. Researchers must take the time to explain the process thoroughly to parents to get valid consent for their child’s participation.Ultimately, Deveney was able to recruit 19 children with severe mood dysregulation (SMD) and 23 healthy controls for her initial study. She began by giving truthful feedback during testing. Both groups of children got nearly all of the responses correct then.Once children were in the scanner, however, she began rigging the answers so that only 40 percent of the correct answers were scored as correct, which frustrated both groups of children, and led to observed frustration in both groups. In some tests, Deveney increased pressure on the subjects even more by saying (falsely) that they were answering too slowly.Both groups grew frustrated, but the children with SMD exhibited more frustration, because of their decreased attention flexibility.The scanner data revealed that the brains of SMD subjects, when frustrated, showed a decrease in activation in the parietal region (associated with spatial attention) as well as in the amygdala and the insula, which are involved in emotions.Frustration decreased spatial attention flexibility by decreasing the ability of the participants to disengage from the cue on the test screen that predicted the target when cue and target were in discordant positions, an effect that was stronger in the subjects with SMD, said Deveney.More Groups to Be AddedIn the future, she plans to add more comparison groups with different psychiatric conditions and also investigate the neural circuitry of irritability and frustration under nonfrustrating conditions.Deveney would also like to explore the interpersonal nature of irritability. Is irritability a product of interaction with a parent or a teacher or is it a more impersonal aspect of frustration?“We hope that understanding what’s happening in the brains of these young children will ultimately help us design more effective treatments,” she concluded. Those treatments could be pharmacological or might involve training patients to have better cognitive control of attention in conditions of frustration.Information about neuroscience research at the National Institutes of Health is posted at http://neuroscience.nih.gov/about.asp. ISSUES NewArchived

Bidirectional interactions between circadian entrainment and cognitive performance

Circadian rhythms influence a variety of physiological and behavioral processes; however, little is known about how circadian rhythms interact with the organisms' ability to acquire and retain information about their environment. These experiments tested whether rats trained outside their endogenous active period demonstrate the same rate of acquisition, daily performance, and remote memory ability as their nocturnally trained counterparts in tasks of sustained attention and spatial memory. Furthermore, we explored how daily task training influenced circadian patterns of activity. We found that rats demonstrate better acquisition and performance on an operant task requiring attentional effort when trained during the dark-phase. Time of day did not affect acquisition or performance on the Morris water maze; however, when animals were retested 2 wk after their last day of training, they showed better remote memory if training originally occurred during the dark-phase. Finally, attentional, but not spatial, task performance during the light-phase promotes a shift toward diurnality and the synchronization of activity to the time of daily training; this shift was most robust when the demands on the cognitive control of attention were highest. Our findings support a theory of bidirectional interactions between cognitive performance and circadian processes and are consistent with the view that the circadian abnormalities associated with shift-work, aging, and neuropsychiatric illnesses may contribute to the deleterious effects on cognition often present in these populations. Furthermore, these findings suggest that time of day should be an important consideration for a variety of cognitive tasks principally used in psychological and neuroscience research.

Cognitive control of attention in the human brain: Insights from orienting attention to mental representations

In this review, we summarize a new line of experimentation showing that attentional orienting can bias information processing in the working memory domain as well as in the perceptual domain to optimize goal-directed behavior. A new experimental paradigm was developed, which revealed that spatial orienting cues that appear after perceptual events (retro-cues), when these have been internalized into working memory representations, can retrospectively enhance performance to a similar degree as spatial precues appearing before perceptual events. As part of their facilitatory action, retro-cues diminish the costs of retrieving items from increasing loads within working memory. Hemodynamic and electrophysiological brain imaging experiments show a high degree of overlap between brain areas and dynamics involved in spatial orienting in the working memory domain compared to the perceptual domain. In addition, functional magnetic resonance imaging points to the selective involvement of frontal areas during spatial orienting in the working memory domain. The roles of different frontal areas remain to be clarified but may include both early roles in guiding spatial shifts occurring within a mnemonic context as well as selection of memorized targets amidst distracting stimuli. Experiments have also begun to reveal the ability to orient attention selectively to object-based representations in working memory and suggest that the neural representations of objects in working memory can be directly modulated by this process. The findings bolster contemporary notions of a strong theoretical relationship between attentional orienting and working memory, suggesting that these two cognitive functions interact in more ways and directions than previously considered.