The Dual Mechanisms of Cognitive Control Project

Tracking Components of Bilingual Language Control in Speech Production: An fMRI Study Using Functional Localizers

When bilingual speakers switch back to speaking in their native language (L1) after having used their second language (L2), they often experience difficulty in retrieving words in their L1. This phenomenon is referred to as the L2 after-effect. We used the L2 after-effect as a lens to explore the neural bases of bilingual language control mechanisms. Our goal was twofold: first, to explore whether bilingual language control draws on domain-general or language-specific mechanisms; second, to investigate the precise mechanism(s) that drive the L2 after-effect. We used a precision fMRI approach based on functional localizers to measure the extent to which the brain activity that reflects the L2 after-effect overlaps with the language network (Fedorenko et al., 2010) and the domain-general multiple demand network (Duncan, 2010), as well as three task-specific networks that tap into interference resolution, lexical retrieval, and articulation. Forty-two Polish-English bilinguals participated in the study. Our results show that the L2 after-effect reflects increased engagement of domain-general but not language-specific resources. Furthermore, contrary to previously proposed interpretations, we did not find evidence that the effect reflects increased difficulty related to lexical access, articulation, and the resolution of lexical interference. We propose that difficulty of speech production in the picture naming paradigm-manifested as the L2 after-effect-reflects interference at a nonlinguistic level of task schemas or a general increase of cognitive control engagement during speech production in L1 after L2.

Parsing state mindfulness effects on neurobehavioral markers of cognitive control: A within-subject comparison of focused attention and open monitoring

Over the past two decades, scientific interest in understanding the relationship between mindfulness and cognition has accelerated. However, despite considerable investigative efforts, pervasive methodological inconsistencies within the literature preclude a thorough understanding of whether or how mindfulness influences core cognitive functions. The purpose of the current study is to provide an initial "proof-of-concept" demonstration of a new research strategy and methodological approach designed to address previous limitations. Specifically, we implemented a novel fully within-subject state induction protocol to elucidate the neurobehavioral influence of discrete mindfulness states-focused attention (FA) and open monitoring (OM), compared against an active control-on well-established behavioral and ERP indices of executive attention and error monitoring assessed during the Eriksen flanker task. Bayesian mixed modeling was used to test preregistered hypotheses pertaining to FA and OM effects on flanker interference, the stimulus-locked P3, and the response-locked ERN and Pe. Results yielded strong but unexpected evidence that OM selectively produced a more cautious and intentional response style, characterized by higher accuracy, slower RTs, and reduced P3 amplitude. Follow-up exploratory analyses revealed that trait mindfulness moderated the influence of OM, such that individuals with greater trait mindfulness responded more cautiously and exhibited higher trial accuracy and smaller P3s. Neither FA nor OM modulated the ERN or Pe. Taken together, our findings support the promise of our approach, demonstrating that theoretically distinct mindfulness states are functionally dissociable among mindfulness-naive participants and that interactive variability associated with different operational facets of mindfulness (i.e., state vs. trait) can be modeled directly.

Control strategy under pressure situations: performance pressure conditionally enhances proactive control

Previous research and theories have demonstrated that attentional control plays a crucial role in explaining the choking phenomenon (i.e., the performance decrements) under pressure situations. Attentional control is thought to function through two distinct control strategies: proactive control (i.e., a sustained and anticipatory strategy of control) and reactive control (i.e., a transient strategy of control). However, little is known about how performance pressure affects these control strategies. The present study was designed to address this issue. Participants were instructed to complete a continuous performance task (AX-CPT40) under pressure situations. The results showed that individuals under high-pressure situations tended to use proactive control rather than reactive control. Moreover, performance pressure resulted in a more liberal response bias following an A-cue, consistent with an increased use of proactive control. Importantly, the proactive behavioral index calculated on RTs showed that the increased proactive control mainly occurred in the short interval between the cue and probe, but not in the long interval. This suggests that individuals under high-pressure situations are unlikely to employ a proactive control strategy in a situation that requires more attentional resources. In summary, our results provide initial evidence that performance pressure conditionally enhances proactive control, which contributes to a deeper understanding of the dynamic adjustment of control strategies under pressure situations.

A spatial version of the Stroop task for examining proactive and reactive control independently from non-conflict processes

Conflict-induced control refers to humans' ability to regulate attention in the processing of target information (e.g., the color of a word in the color-word Stroop task) based on experience with conflict created by distracting information (e.g., an incongruent color word), and to do so either in a proactive (preparatory) or a reactive (stimulus-driven) fashion. Interest in conflict-induced control has grown recently, as has the awareness that effects attributed to those processes might be affected by conflict-unrelated processes (e.g., the learning of stimulus-response associations). This awareness has resulted in the recommendation to move away from traditional interference paradigms with small stimulus/response sets and towards paradigms with larger sets (at least four targets, distractors, and responses), paradigms that allow better control of non-conflict processes. Using larger sets, however, is not always feasible. Doing so in the Stroop task, for example, would require either multiple arbitrary responses that are difficult for participants to learn (e.g., manual responses to colors) or non-arbitrary responses that can be difficult for researchers to collect (e.g., vocal responses in online experiments). Here, we present a spatial version of the Stroop task that solves many of those problems. In this task, participants respond to one of six directions indicated by an arrow, each requiring a specific, non-arbitrary manual response, while ignoring the location where the arrow is displayed. We illustrate the usefulness of this task by showing the results of two experiments in which evidence for proactive and reactive control was obtained while controlling for the impact of non-conflict processes.

Complementary benefits of multivariate and hierarchical models for identifying individual differences in cognitive control

Understanding individual differences in cognitive control is a central goal in psychology and neuroscience. Reliably measuring these differences, however, has proven extremely challenging, at least when using standard measures in cognitive neuroscience such as response times or task-based fMRI activity. While prior work has pinpointed the source of the issue - the vast amount of cross-trial variability within these measures - no study has rigorously evaluated potential solutions. Here, we do so with one potential way forward: an analytic framework that combines hierarchical Bayesian modeling with multivariate decoding of trial-level fMRI data. Using this framework and longitudinal data from the Dual Mechanisms of Cognitive Control project, we estimated individuals' neural responses associated with cognitive control within a color-word Stroop task, then assessed the reliability of these individuals' responses across a time interval of several months. We show that in many prefrontal and parietal brain regions, test-retest reliability was near maximal, and that only hierarchical models were able to reveal this state of affairs. Further, when compared to traditional univariate contrasts, multivariate decoding enabled individual-level correlations to be estimated with significantly greater precision. We specifically link these improvements in precision to the optimized suppression of cross-trial variability in decoding. Together, these findings not only indicate that cognitive control-related neural responses individuate people in a highly stable manner across time, but also suggest that integrating hierarchical and multivariate models provides a powerful approach for investigating individual differences in cognitive control, one that can effectively address the issue of high-variability measures.

Cognitive control controls the effect of irrelevant stimulus-response learning

Research has established that two cognitive processes, cognitive control and irrelevant stimulus-response (S-R) learning, may underlie the proportion congruency effect, which refers to the findings that the size of interference effects (e.g., the Stroop, Simon, or Eriksen flanker effect) reduces with increasing the proportion of incongruent trials. Further studies have begun to investigate the interaction between these two cognitive processes, which not only provide more plausible accounts for empirical data, but also advance theories. The present study set out to investigate whether cognitive control can modulate the effect of irrelevant S-R learning. In two experiments, we combined a color-letter contingency task, in which we manipulated the contingencies (low vs. high) of irrelevant S-R associations, with a color-Chinese character Stroop task, in which we manipulated the ratio of neutral to incongruent trials (mostly neutral (MN) versus mostly incongruent (MI)). Experiment 1 showed a proportion neutral effect (the Stroop effect was smaller in the MI than in the MN condition), suggesting changes in control demand. Critically, the contingency effect (faster responses in the high- than in the low-contingency condition) reduced in the MI than in the MN condition. Experiment 2 (preregistered) increased the number of Chinese characters to exclude a familiarity account for the proportion neutral effect, which replicated the findings of Experiment 1. These results suggest that cognitive control induced in the Stroop task transferred to the contingency task and modulated the contingency effect. Thus, this study provides clear evidence that cognitive control can modulate the effect of irrelevant S-R learning.

On the psychometric evaluation of cognitive control tasks: An Investigation with the Dual Mechanisms of Cognitive Control (DMCC) battery

The domain of cognitive control has been a major focus of experimental, neuroscience, and individual differences research. Currently, however, no theory of cognitive control successfully unifies both experimental and individual differences findings. Some perspectives deny that there even exists a unified psychometric cognitive control construct to be measured at all. These shortcomings of the current literature may reflect the fact that current cognitive control paradigms are optimized for the detection of within-subject experimental effects rather than individual differences. In the current study, we examine the psychometric properties of the Dual Mechanisms of Cognitive Control (DMCC) task battery, which was designed in accordance with a theoretical framework that postulates common sources of within-subject and individual differences variation. We evaluated both internal consistency and test-retest reliability, and for the latter, utilized both classical test theory measures (i.e., split-half methods, intraclass correlation) and newer hierarchical Bayesian estimation of generative models. Although traditional psychometric measures suggested poor reliability, the hierarchical Bayesian models indicated a different pattern, with good to excellent test-retest reliability in almost all tasks and conditions examined. Moreover, within-task, between-condition correlations were generally increased when using the Bayesian model-derived estimates, and these higher correlations appeared to be directly linked to the higher reliability of the measures. In contrast, between-task correlations remained low regardless of theoretical manipulations or estimation approach. Together, these findings highlight the advantages of Bayesian estimation methods, while also pointing to the important role of reliability in the search for a unified theory of cognitive control.

Cognitive Control in Schizophrenia: Advances in Computational Approaches

Psychiatric research is undergoing significant advances in an emerging subspeciality of computational psychiatry, building upon cognitive neuroscience research by expanding to neurocomputational modeling. Here, we illustrate some research trends in this domain using work on proactive cognitive control deficits in schizophrenia as an example. We provide a selective review of formal modeling approaches to understanding cognitive control deficits in psychopathology, focusing primarily on biologically plausible connectionist-level models as well as mathematical models that generate parameter estimates of putatively dissociable psychological or neural processes. We illustrate some of the advantages of these models in terms of understanding both cognitive control deficits in schizophrenia and the potential roles of effort and motivation. Further, we highlight critical future directions for this work, including a focus on establishing psychometric properties, additional work modeling psychotic symptoms and their interaction with cognitive control, and the need to expand both behavioral and neural modeling to samples that include individuals with different mental health conditions, allowing for the examination of dissociable neural or psychological substrates for seemingly similar cognitive impairments across disorders.

Basis of executive functions in fine-grained architecture of cortical and subcortical human brain networks

Theoretical models suggest that executive functions rely on both domain-general and domain-specific processes. Supporting this view, prior brain imaging studies have revealed that executive activations converge and diverge within broadly characterized brain networks. However, the lack of precise anatomical mappings has impeded our understanding of the interplay between domain-general and domain-specific processes. To address this challenge, we used the high-resolution multimodal magnetic resonance imaging approach of the Human Connectome Project to scan participants performing 3 canonical executive tasks: n-back, rule switching, and stop signal. The results reveal that, at the individual level, different executive activations converge within 9 domain-general territories distributed in frontal, parietal, and temporal cortices. Each task exhibits a unique topography characterized by finely detailed activation gradients within domain-general territory shifted toward adjacent resting-state networks; n-back activations shift toward the default mode, rule switching toward dorsal attention, and stop signal toward cingulo-opercular networks. Importantly, the strongest activations arise at multimodal neurobiological definitions of network borders. Matching results are seen in circumscribed regions of the caudate nucleus, thalamus, and cerebellum. The shifting peaks of local gradients at the intersection of task-specific networks provide a novel mechanistic insight into how partially-specialized networks interact with neighboring domain-general territories to generate distinct executive functions.

Cognitive control impairment in ax-continuous performance test in patients with schizophrenia: A pilot EEG study

OBJECTIVES

This study aimed to investigate the mechanism of cognitive control impairment in patients with schizophrenia (SPs) using electroencephalogram (EEG).

METHODS

A total of 17 SPs and 17 healthy controls (HCs) were included in this study. We measured the EEG activity, whereas they performed the AX-continuous performance test which consisted of the preparatory phase and the response phase. The MATRICS Consensus Cognitive Battery (MCCB) was used for cognitive function, and the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) was used for clinical symptom assessment. A univariate linear regression model was used to explore the relationships among behavioral index, event-related potentials (ERPs), rhythmic oscillation power, and score of MCCB and PANSS.

RESULTS

A significant difference was found in response accuracy and reaction time (RT) during the preparatory phase between patients and HCs (p < .05). During the response phase, the SPs exhibited longer RT than the HCs (p < .05). Analysis of the ERPs revealed that the amplitude of P3a on BX clues was significantly smaller in SPs than in HCs (p < .05). Additionally, the midline frontal theta power of neural oscillation was significantly lower in the SPs than in NCs both during the preparatory and response phases. The accuracies on BX clues (r = .694, p = .002) and d'context (r = .698, p = .002) were positively correlated with MCCB scores.

CONCLUSION

The present study revealed that patients with schizophrenia have deficits both in proactive and reactive cognitive control, with a greater reliance on reactive control during conflict resolution. The neural mechanisms of the cognitive control impairment may involve the inability to engage additional neural resources for proactive control, and a reduction in frontal midline theta power during both proactive and reactive control. The severity of proactive control impairment is positively correlated with an increased tendency to rely on reactive control.

Dissociating proactive and reactive control in older adults

The Dual Mechanisms of Control framework predicts that age-related declines should be most prominent for tasks that require proactive control, while tasks requiring reactive control should show minimal age differences in performance. However, results from traditional paradigms are inconclusive as to whether these two processes are independent, making it difficult to understand how these processes change with age. The present study manipulated the proportion congruency in a list-wide (Experiments 1 and 2) or item-specific (Experiment 1) fashion to independently assess proactive and reactive control, respectively. In the list-wide task, older adults were unable to proactively bias attention away from word processing based on list-level expectancies. Proactive control deficits replicated across multiple task paradigms, with different Stroop stimuli (picture-word, integrated color-word, separated color-word), and different behavioral indices (Stroop interference, secondary prospective memory). In contrast, older adults were successfully able to reactively filter the word dimension based on item-specific expectancies. These findings provide unambiguous support that aging is associated with declines in proactive, but not reactive, control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Efficient evaluation of the Open QC task fMRI dataset

This article is an evaluation of the task dataset as part of the Demonstrating Quality Control (QC) Procedures in fMRI (FMRI Open QC Project) methodological research topic. The quality of both the task and fMRI aspects of the dataset are summarized in concise reports created with R, AFNI, and knitr. The reports and underlying tests are designed to highlight potential issues, are pdf files for easy archiving, and require relatively little experience to use and adapt. This article is accompanied by both the compiled reports and the source code and explanation necessary to use them.

Proactive and reactive cognitive control for emotional conflict in individuals with high schizotypy: An ERP study

OBJECTIVE

The present study aimed to examine how individuals with high schizotypy, a high risk group of schizophrenia patients, resolve emotional conflict in proactive and reactive control and the underlying neural mechanisms.

METHODS

Thirty-two individuals with high schizotypy and 30 matched individuals with low schizotypy completed an emotional face-word Stroop task with electroencephalographic data recorded. The proportion of incongruent trials was manipulated in the task to induce proactive control (mostly incongruent trials context, MI context) or reactive control (mostly congruent trials context, MC context). Two event-related potential (ERP) components (N170 and N2) were examined, which represent face processing and cognitive control processes, respectively.

RESULTS

In the MC context, significantly decreased N2 and N170 amplitudes were found in high schizotypy individuals compared with low schizotypy individuals, suggesting abnormal neural activity of reactive control in high schizotypy individuals. No significant differences were found between the two groups in the MI context.

CONCLUSIONS

These results provide initial evidence for dissociation of neural activity of proactive and reactive control on emotional conflict in individuals with high schizotypy.

SIGNIFICANCE

The current findings provide important insight into the emotional conflict resolution in the schizophrenia spectrum.

If you don’t let it in, you don’t have to get it out: Thought preemption as a method to control unwanted thoughts

To attain goals, people must proactively prevent interferences and react to interferences once they occur. Whereas most research focuses on how people deal with external interferences, here we investigate the use of proactive and reactive control in dealing with unwanted thoughts. To examine this question, we asked people to generate an association to each of several repeating cue words, while forbidding the repetition of associations. Reactively rejecting and replacing unwanted repeated associations after they occur entails slower response times. Conversely, proactive control entails constricting the search space and thus faster response times. To gain further insight into different potential proactive thought control mechanisms, we augmented the analysis of raw response times with a novel, hypothesis-based, tractable computational model describing how people serially sample associations. Our results indicate that people primarily react to unwanted thoughts after they occur. Yet, we found evidence for two latent proactive control mechanisms: one that allows people to mitigate the episodic strengthening of repeated thoughts, and another that helps avoid looping in a repetitive thought. Exploratory analysis showed a relationship between model parameters and self-reported individual differences in the control over unwanted thoughts in daily life. The findings indicate the novel task and model can advance our understanding of how people can and cannot control their thoughts and memories, and benefit future research on the mechanisms responsible for unwanted thought in different psychiatric conditions. Finally, we discuss implications concerning the involvement of associative thinking and various control processes in semantic fluency, decision-making and creativity.

Experimental Manipulation of Guided Attention to the Shoulder Movement Task in Clinical Dohsa-hou Induces Shifts in the Reactive Mode and Indicates Flexible Cognitive Control Performance

The empirical basis for self-control in Dohsa-hou as it relates to effects on cognitive processes has been explored in a few studies of the Japanese psychotherapy, but not under standardized conditions with a strong predictive theory of control. This study reports on a series of experiments with the Dual Mechanisms of Control framework to clarify the possible regulatory mechanism of Dohsa-hou by focusing on shoulder movement, a key body movement task used by practitioners across applied settings. Cognitive control was operationalized with the AX version of Continuous Performance Test (AX-CPT) paradigm for proactive control and a modified Stroop task paradigm for reactive control in a 3-arm parallel group trial study design. Healthy Japanese university students were assigned to a Dohsa-hou group that performed a shoulder movement task for few minutes, an active control group that performed a similar task, or a passive control group comprised of a resting condition. A total of 55 participants performed the AX-CPT and 57 participants performed the modified Stroop task before and after the group manipulation. In the AX-CPT, an increase in the error rate of AY (true cue-false probe) trial from pre- to post-test was observed in the passive control group only, and found to be marginally higher in the passive control group relative to Dohsa-hou group at post-test. This indicated that Dohsa-hou moderated the activation of proactive control by repeated AX-CPT performance. The error rate of the Proactive Behavioral Index did not differ from zero at post-test only in the Dohsa-hou group, indicating flexible cognitive control. In the modified Stroop task, there was no difference between congruent and incongruent trials at post-test for the Dohsa-hou group only, indicating the facilitation of reactive control. The evidence for a balancing effect for the Dohsa-hou-based shoulder movement task indicates that clients experience a form of continuous self-monitoring, which might reduce mind-wandering from their focus on movement execution combined with iterative verbal feedback from the therapist. Overall, the results of the present study suggest that the self-regulatory mechanism promoted in clinical Dohsa-hou emphasizes guided shifts in attention to the reactive mode toward a balance of cognitive control.

The Dual Mechanisms of Cognitive Control dataset, a theoretically-guided within-subject task fMRI battery

Cognitive control is a critical higher mental function, which is subject to considerable individual variation, and is impaired in a range of mental health disorders. We describe here the initial release of Dual Mechanisms of Cognitive Control (DMCC) project data, the DMCC55B dataset, with 55 healthy unrelated young adult participants. Each participant performed four well-established cognitive control tasks (AX-CPT, Cued Task-Switching, Sternberg Working Memory, and Stroop) while undergoing functional MRI scanning. The dataset includes a range of state and trait self-report questionnaires, as well as behavioural tasks assessing individual differences in cognitive ability. The DMCC project is on-going and features additional components (e.g., related participants, manipulations of cognitive control mode, resting state fMRI, longitudinal testing) that will be publicly released following study completion. This DMCC55B subset is released early with the aim of encouraging wider use and greater benefit to the scientific community. The DMCC55B dataset is suitable for benchmarking and methods exploration, as well as analyses of task performance and individual differences.

Preparing for Success: Neural Frontal Theta and Posterior Alpha Dynamics during Action Preparation Predict Flexible Resolution of Cognitive Conflicts

Cognitive conflicts typically arise in situations that call for sudden changes in our behavior. Resolving cognitive conflicts is challenging and prone to errors. Humans can improve their chances to successfully resolve conflicts by mentally preparing for potential behavioral adjustments. Previous studies indicated that neural theta oscillations (4-7 Hz), as well as alpha oscillations (8-14 Hz), are reflective of cognitive control processes during conflict resolution. However, the role or neural oscillations for conflict preparation is still unclear. Therefore, the aim of the current study was to determine which oscillatory changes during conflict preparation predict subsequent resolution success. Participants performed a cued change-signal task, in which an anticipatory cue indicated if the upcoming trial might contain a cognitive conflict or not. Oscillatory activity was assessed via EEG. Cues that indicated that a conflict might arise compared with cues that indicated no conflict led to increases, directly followed by decreases, in theta power, as well as to decreases in alpha power. These cue-induced changes in theta and alpha oscillations occurred widespread across the cortex. Importantly, successful compared with failed conflict trials were characterized by selective increases in frontal theta power, as well as decreases in posterior alpha power during preparation. In addition, higher frontal theta power and lower posterior alpha power during preparation predicted faster conflict resolution. Our study shows that increases in frontal theta power, as well as decreases in posterior alpha power, are markers of optimal preparation for situations that necessitate flexible changes in behavior.

Investigating mindfulness influences on cognitive function: On the promise and potential of converging research strategies

Research investigating the effects and underlying mechanisms of mindfulness on cognitive functioning has accelerated exponentially over the past two decades. Despite the rapid growth of the literature and its influential role in garnering public interest in mindfulness, inconsistent methods in defining and measuring mindfulness have yielded variable findings, which contribute to the overall dearth of clear generalizable conclusions. The focus of this article is to address the lack of cohesion in the collective methodologies used in this domain by providing a new perspective grounded in classic cognitive and experimental psychology principles. We leverage the concept of converging operations to demonstrate how seemingly disparate research strategies can be integrated towards a more unified and systematic approach. An organizing taxonomic framework is described to provide useful structure in how mindfulness can be operationalized, measured, and investigated. We illustrate the rationale and core organizing principles of the framework through a selective review of studies on mindfulness and cognitive control. We then demonstrate the utility of the approach by showing how it can be applied to synthesize extant methodologies and guide the development of future research. Specific suggestions and examples pertaining to experimental design and statistical analysis are provided.

A Representational Similarity Analysis of Cognitive Control during Color-Word Stroop

Progress in understanding the neural bases of cognitive control has been supported by the paradigmatic color-word Stroop task, in which a target response (color name) must be selected over a more automatic, yet potentially incongruent, distractor response (word). For this paradigm, models have postulated complementary coding schemes: dorsomedial frontal cortex (DMFC) is proposed to evaluate the demand for control via incongruency-related coding, whereas dorsolateral PFC (DLPFC) is proposed to implement control via goal and target-related coding. Yet, mapping these theorized schemes to measured neural activity within this task has been challenging. Here, we tested for these coding schemes relatively directly, by decomposing an event-related color-word Stroop task via representational similarity analysis. Three neural coding models were fit to the similarity structure of multivoxel patterns of human fMRI activity, acquired from 65 healthy, young-adult males and females. Incongruency coding was predominant in DMFC, whereas both target and incongruency coding were present with indistinguishable strength in DLPFC. In contrast, distractor information was strongly encoded within early visual cortex. Further, these coding schemes were differentially related to behavior: individuals with stronger DLPFC (and lateral posterior parietal cortex) target coding, but weaker DMFC incongruency coding, exhibited less behavioral Stroop interference. These results highlight the utility of the representational similarity analysis framework for investigating neural mechanisms of cognitive control and point to several promising directions to extend the Stroop paradigm.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT How the human brain enables cognitive control - the ability to override behavioral habits to pursue internal goals - has been a major focus of neuroscience research. This ability has been frequently investigated by using the Stroop color-word naming task. With the Stroop as a test-bed, many theories have proposed specific neuroanatomical dissociations, in which medial and lateral frontal brain regions underlie cognitive control by encoding distinct types of information. Yet providing a direct confirmation of these claims has been challenging. Here, we demonstrate that representational similarity analysis, which estimates and models the similarity structure of brain activity patterns, can successfully establish the hypothesized functional dissociations within the Stroop task. Representational similarity analysis may provide a useful approach for investigating cognitive control mechanisms.