Project description:Major depressive disorders (MDD) exhibit cognitive dysfunction with respect to attention. The deficiencies in cognitive control of emotional information are associated with MDD as compared to healthy controls (HC). However, the brain mechanism underlying emotion that influences the attentional control in MDD necessitates further research. The present study explores the emotion-regulated cognitive competence in MDD at a dynamic attentional stage. Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 35 clinical MDD outpatients and matched HCs by applying a modified affective priming dot-probe paradigm, which consisted of various emotional facial expression pairs. From a dynamic perspective, ERPs combined with sLORETA results showed significant differences among the groups. In compared to HC, 100?ms MDD group exhibited a greater interior-prefrontal N100, sensitive to negative-neutral faces. 200?ms MDD showed an activated parietal-occipital P200 linked to sad face, suggesting that the attentional control ability concentrated on sad mood-congruent cognition. 300?ms, a distinct P300 was observed at dorsolateral parietal cortex, representing a sustained attentional control. Our findings suggested that a negatively sad emotion influenced cognitive attentional control in MDD in the early and late attentional stages of cognition. P200 and P300 might be predictors of potential neurocognitive mechanism underlying the dysregulated attentional control of MDD.
Project description:The capacity to suppress irrelevant incoming input, termed sensory gating, is one of the most investigated inhibitory processes associated with cognitive impairments due to aging. The aim of this study was to examine the influence of aging on sensory gating by using somatosensory event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by repetitive non-painful tactile stimulation (paired-pulsed task). Somatosensory ERPs were recorded in 20 healthy young adults and 20 healthy older adults while they received two identical pneumatic stimuli (S1 and S2) of 100 ms duration with an inter-stimulus interval of 550 ± 50 ms on both forefingers. The difference between the somatosensory ERPs amplitude elicited by S1 and S2 was computed as a sensory gating measure. The amplitude and the latency of P50, N100 and late positive complex (LPC) were analyzed as well as the source generators of the gating effect. Reduced sensory gating was found in older individuals for N100 at frontal and centro-parietal electrodes and for LPC at fronto-central electrodes. Source localization analyses also revealed a reduced current density during gating effect in the older group in frontal areas in N100 and LPC. Moreover, older individuals showed delayed latencies in N100. No significant gating effect differences were found between groups in P50. These findings suggest an age-related slowing of processing speed and a reduced efficiency of inhibitory mechanisms in response to repetitive somatosensory information during stimulus evaluation, and a preservation of processing speed and inhibitory control during early stimulus coding in aging.
Project description:PurposeThe purpose of present study was to investigate the impact of sport experience on response inhibition and response re-engagement in expert badminton athletes during the stop-signal task and change-signal task.MethodsA total of 19 badminton athletes and 20 nonathletes performed both the stop-signal task and change-signal task. Reaction times (RTs) and event-related potentials were recorded and analyzed.ResultsBehavioral results indicated that badminton athletes responded faster than nonathletes to go stimuli and to change signals, with faster change RTs and change-signal RTs, which take into consideration the variable stimulus onset time mean. During successful change trials in the change-signal task, the amplitudes of the event-related potential components N2 and P3 were smaller for badminton athletes than for nonathletes. Moreover, change-signal RTs and N2 amplitudes as well as change RTs and P3 amplitudes were significantly correlated in badminton athletes. A significant correlation was also found between the amplitude of the event-related potential component N1 and response accuracy to change signals in badminton athletes.ConclusionModeration of brain cortical activity in badminton athletes was more associated with their ability to rapidly inhibit a planned movement and re-engage with a new movement compared with nonathletes. The superior inhibitory control and more efficient neural mechanisms in badminton athletes compared with nonathletes might be a result of badminton athletes' professional training experience.
Project description:ObjectiveReduced inhibitory control is a general characteristic of smokers and becomes increasingly pronounced in smoking-related contexts. However, research has rarely considered differences in the effects of various smoking-related cues. To fill this research gap, this study compared the effects of smoking object-related and smoking social-related cues on inhibitory control in smokers.MethodsWe used a visual Go/NoGo paradigm with three types of long-lasting backgrounds (neutral, smoking object, and smoking social background) to record the error rates, reaction times, and amplitudes of the N2 and P3 event-related potentials (ERPs) by 25 smokers and 25 non-smokers.Results(1) Smokers displayed smaller NoGo-N2 amplitudes than controls under the neutral background; (2) smokers displayed smaller NoGo-N2 amplitudes under the smoking social background and smoking object background than they did under the neutral background; (3) relative to neutral and smoking object backgrounds, smokers displayed higher commission error rates, shorter reaction times, and larger NoGo-P3 amplitudes under smoking social background.ConclusionSmoking-related stimuli impair inhibitory control in smokers, especially when these stimuli are socially related.
Project description:Pervasive deficits of attention and set switching have been reported in schizophrenia, prompting efforts to identify the information processing mechanisms associated with these deficits. Recent evidence suggests that set switching may be intact in schizophrenia when the task switch requires only a change in the relevance of perceptual dimensions (e.g., attentional set switches) but decision-to-response mappings (intentional set) are maintained across trials in a cued task switching procedure. The goal of the present research was to replicate this finding and to test its direct corollary, which is the unconventional prediction that individuals with schizophrenia will evidence an intact, switch-sensitive P3(b) brain response to cued switches of attentional set. This prediction was tested in a group of 20 individuals with schizophrenia and 20 healthy comparison participants using event-related brain potential methodology and a cued task-switching task. Attentional set switching costs were equivalent between the two groups despite a set maintenance deficit in schizophrenia. Moreover, a posterior-parietal P3(b) component of the ERP was found to be equally sensitive to attentional set switching in schizophrenia and comparison groups, indicating a "healthy" brain response to switches of attentional set in schizophrenia. These results suggest that the dynamic control of attentional set may be preserved in schizophrenia and that previously reported executive deficits may be specific to the control of intentional task set and to deficits of task set maintenance.
Project description:ObjectivePostural control plays a key role in skill-oriented sports. Athletes of skill-oriented sports (hereinafter referred to as "skilled athletes") usually showed better control ability compared with non-athletes. However, research focused on the single postural task, rarely considering the actual situation in skill-oriented sports in which other processes, such as cognitive control, frequently accompany postural control. This study aims to explore how skilled athletes control their posture under the dual-task situation and use limited attentional resources.MethodA total of 26 skilled athletes and 26 non-athletes were required to perform the postural control and N-back tasks simultaneously. Center of pressure (COP) trajectory, reaction times (RTs), and discriminability (d') of N-back tasks were recorded and evaluated, along with event-related potentials, including N1 (Oz, PO7, and PO8), P2 (Fz, FCz, Cz, and Pz) components, and the spectral power of alpha band.ResultsSkilled athletes demonstrated more postural control stability and a higher d' than non-athletes in all dual tasks. Besides, they showed enhanced N1, P2 amplitudes and reduced alpha band power during dual-tasking. Notably, in skilled athletes, a significant negative correlation between N1 amplitude and d' was observed, while significant positive correlations between alpha band power and postural control performance were also identified.ConclusionThis study investigates the potential advantages of skilled athletes in postural control from the view of neuroscience. Compared to non-athletes, skilled athletes could decrease the consumption of attentional resources in postural control and recruit more attentional resources in stimulus discrimination and evaluation in cognitive tasks. Since the allocation of attentional resources plays a crucial part in postural control in skilled athletes, optimizing the postural control training program and the selection of skilled athletes from a dual-task perspective is important.
Project description:BackgroundInhibition processing is sensitive to aging, and an age-related decline in inhibition processing has been associated with an accelerated rate of progression to Alzheimer disease. Elderly women are two to three times more likely than age-matched men to have Alzheimer disease. Therefore, this study examined whether long-term high physical activity affects inhibitory processing, specifically among postmenopausal women.MethodsIn total, 251 candidates were screened using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment and the Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices to assess their cognitive abilities and the International Physical Activity Questionnaire (Chinese version) to assess their physical activity levels. The participants were then grouped into either a long-term high physical activity group (defined as more than 3 days of high intensity activity per week and gross metabolic equivalent minutes (MET-minutes) higher than 1,500 MET-minutes/week or a gross MET higher than 3,000 MET-minutes/week obtained through walking or other moderate or high intensity activity) or a control group and matched for demographic and health characteristics as well as cognitive scores. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded as participants performed a Go/No-go task to assess inhibition processing.ResultsThe long-term high physical activity group (n = 30) had faster Go reaction times than the control group (n = 30), whereas no significant difference between the two groups was found in their performance accuracy on the No-go task. For the ERP results, the latency of N2 component was significantly shorter in the long-term high physical activity group than that in the control group.DiscussionThe results of this study suggested that long-term high physical activity may increase the efficiency of the inhibitory control system by increasing the activity of response monitoring processes.
Project description:Contemporary models of substance use disorders emphasize the role of cognitive control, which has been linked to difficulties in resisting the use of substances. In the present study, we measured two aspects of cognitive control, response inhibition (operationalized by a Go/NoGo Task) and performance monitoring (operationalized by an Eriksen Flanker Task), in a group of young cannabis-use disorder (CUD) patients and compared these functions with two control groups (i.e. a group of cigarette smokers and a group of non-smokers). We employed both behavioural and electrophysiological measures. The results indicate that CUD patients displayed reduced NoGo-P3 event-related potentials compared with non-smoking controls, but not compared with smoking controls. In addition, CUD patients were slower on Go trials than both control groups. No other between-group electrophysiological or behavioural differences were observed. These results seem to suggest that CUD patients have problems related to response inhibition, but performance monitoring seems relatively unaffected.
Project description:Aging is accompanied by frontal lobe and non-dominant hemisphere recruitment that supports executive functioning, such as inhibitory control, which is crucial to all cognitive functions. However, the spatio-temporal sequence of processing underlying successful inhibition and how it changes with age is understudied. Thus, we capitalized on the temporal precision of event-related potentials (ERPs) to assess the functional lateralization of N200 (conflict monitoring) and P300 (inhibitory performance evaluation) in young and healthy older adults during comparably performed successful stop-signal inhibition. We additionally used temporal principal components analysis (PCA) to further interrogate the continuous spatio-temporal dynamics underlying N200 and P300 activation for each group. Young adults demonstrated left hemisphere-dominant N200, while older adults demonstrated overall larger amplitudes and right hemisphere dominance. N200 activation was explained by a single PCA factor in both age groups, but with a more anterior scalp distribution in older adults. The P300 amplitudes were larger in the right hemisphere in young, but bilateral in old, with old larger than young in the left hemisphere. P300 was also explained by a single factor in young adults but by two factors in older adults, including distinct parieto-occipital and anterior activation. These findings highlight the differential functional asymmetries of conflict monitoring (N200) and inhibitory evaluation and adaptation (P300) processes and further illuminate unique age-related spatio-temporal recruitment patterns. Older adults demonstrated lateralized recruitment during conflict processing and bilateral recruitment during evaluation and adaptation, with anterior recruitment common to both processes. These fine-grained analyses are critically important for more precise understanding of age-related compensatory activation.
Project description:Williams syndrome (WS) is a genetic disorder caused by a hemizygous microdeletion on chromosome 7q11.23. WS is associated with a compelling neurocognitive profile characterized by relative deficits in visuospatial function, relative strengths in face and language processing, and enhanced drive toward social engagement. We used a combined functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and event-related potential (ERP) approach to examine the neural basis of social responsiveness in WS participants to two types of social stimuli, negative (fearful) and positive (happy) emotional facial expressions. Here, we report a double dissociation consistent across both methods such that WS participants exhibited heightened amygdala reactivity to positive (happy) social stimuli and absent or attenuated amygdala reactivity to negative (fearful) social stimuli, compared with controls. The fMRI findings indicate that atypical social processing in WS may be rooted in altered development of disparate amygdalar nuclei that subserve different social functions. The ERP findings suggest that abnormal amygdala reactivity in WS may possibly function to increase attention to and encoding of happy expressions and to decrease arousal to fearful expressions. This study provides the first evidence that the genetic deletion associated with WS influences the function of the amygdala to be particularly responsive to socially appetitive stimuli.