Same same but different: Subtle but consequential differences between two measures to linearly integrate speed and accuracy (LISAS vs. BIS)

Mediation of beneficial effects of an alcohol-specific inhibition training on drinking of patients with alcohol use disorder: The role of cognitive demands and inhibitory performance

BACKGROUND

A cognitively demanding, alcohol-specific inhibition training (Alc-IT) might enhance treatment success in patients with severe alcohol use disorder (AUD; Stein et al., 2023). An inhibitory working mechanism for Alc-IT has been discussed, but compelling evidence supporting this hypothesis is yet lacking. The present study investigates inhibitory performance during Alc-IT and examines whether inhibitory parameters mediate drinking outcome.

METHODS

Patients with AUD (N = 232) completed six sessions of either a standard or improved Alc-IT, differing in their inhibitory demands determined by Go/NoGo-ratios in a modified Go-NoGo-task, or a control training. During these training sessions, data on inhibitory performance was collected. To assess differences in inhibitory performance and its improvement, alcohol-related errors of commission and relative performance, integrating accuracy and speed, were analyzed with hierarchical linear contrast models. Mediation analyses tested whether inhibitory performance predicted drinking outcome (percent days abstinent at 3-month follow-up).

RESULTS

Patients in improved Alc-IT started with higher errors of commission (γ01(standard) =  -2.74, p < 0.001, R2 = 0.885) and a lower relative performance in the first training session compared to standard Alc-IT (γ01(standard) = 0.51, p = 0.004). They showed a steeper increase in relative performance until the final sixth session (γ1(s6),(standard) = -0.37, p = 0.024, R2 = 0.882). The effect of improved Alc-IT on drinking outcome was mediated by relative performance increase (bootstrap-CI [0.15, 7.11]).

CONCLUSION

Higher inhibitory demands enable larger improvements across sessions. Mediation analysis supports an inhibitory working mechanism. Tailoring inhibitory demands to individual performance capacity could optimize future Alc-IT.

Implicit measures of suicide vulnerability: Investigating suicide-related information-processing biases and a deficit in behavioral impulse control in a high-risk sample and healthy controls

OBJECTIVE

Relevant implicit markers of suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs) have only been studied in isolation with mixed evidence. This is the first study that investigated a suicide attentional bias, a death-identity bias and a deficit in behavioral impulsivity in a high-risk sample and healthy controls.

METHOD

We administered the Death Implicit Association Test, the Modified Suicide Stroop Task, and a Go/No-Go Task to inpatient suicide ideators (n = 42), suicide attempters (n = 40), and community controls (n = 61).

RESULTS

Suicide ideators and attempters showed a suicide attentional bias and a death-identity bias compared to healthy controls. Ideators and attempters did not differ in these implicit information-processing biases. Notably, only attempters were more behaviorally impulsive compared to controls; however, ideators and attempters did not significantly differ in behavioral impulsivity. Moreover, implicit scores were positively intercorrelated in the total sample.

CONCLUSION

In line with the Cognitive Model of Suicide, ideators and attempters display suicide-related information processing biases, which can be considered as implicit cognitive markers of suicide vulnerability. Furthermore, attempters have elevated levels of behavioral impulsiveness. These results are highly relevant in the context of crisis intervention strategies and warrant further research.

Instrumental music training relates to intensity assessment but not emotional prosody recognition in Mandarin

Building on research demonstrating the benefits of music training for emotional prosody recognition in nontonal languages, this study delves into its unexplored influence on tonal languages. In tonal languages, the acoustic similarity between lexical tones and music, along with the dual role of pitch in conveying lexical and affective meanings, create a unique interplay. We evaluated 72 participants, half of whom had extensive instrumental music training, with the other half serving as demographically matched controls. All participants completed an online test consisting of 210 Chinese pseudosentences, each designed to express one of five emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, or neutrality. Our robust statistical analyses, which included effect size estimates and Bayesian factors, revealed that music and nonmusic groups exhibit similar abilities in identifying the emotional prosody of various emotions. However, the music group attributed higher intensity ratings to emotional prosodies of happiness, fear, and anger compared to the nonmusic group. These findings suggest that while instrumental music training is not related to emotional prosody recognition, it does appear to be related to perceived emotional intensity. This dissociation between emotion recognition and intensity evaluation adds a new piece to the puzzle of the complex relationship between music training and emotion perception in tonal languages.

Regional brain activity and neural network changes in cognitive-motor dual-task interference: A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study

Previous neuroimaging studies have reported dual-task interference (DTi) and deterioration of task performance in a cognitive-motor dual task (DT) compared to that in a single task (ST). Greater frontoparietal activity is a neural signature of DTi; nonetheless, the underlying mechanism of cortical network in DTi still remains unclear. This study aimed to investigate the regional brain activity and neural network changes during DTi induced by highly demanding cognitive-motor DT. Thirty-four right-handed healthy young adults performed the spiral-drawing task. They underwent a paced auditory serial addition test (PASAT) simultaneously or independently while their cortical activity was measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy. Motor performance was determined using the balanced integration score (BIS), a balanced index of drawing speed and precision. The cognitive task of the PASAT was administered with two difficulty levels defined by 1 s (PASAT-1 s) and 2 s (PASAT-2 s) intervals, allowing for the serial addition of numbers. Cognitive performance was determined using the percentage of correct responses. These motor and cognitive performances were significantly reduced during DT, which combined a drawing and a cognitive task at either difficulty level, compared to those in the corresponding ST conditions. The DT conditions were also characterized by significantly increased activity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) compared to that in the ST conditions. Multivariate Granger causality (GC) analysis of cortical activity in the selected frontoparietal regions of interest further revealed selective top-down causal connectivity from the right DLPFC to the right inferior parietal cortex during DTs. Furthermore, changes in the frontoparietal GC connectivity strength between the PASAT-2 s DT and ST conditions significantly correlated negatively with changes in the percentage of correct responses. Therefore, DTi can occur even in cognitively proficient young adults, and the right DLPFC and frontoparietal network being crucial neural mechanisms underlying DTi. These findings provide new insights into DTi and its underlying neural mechanisms and have implications for the clinical utility of cognitive-motor DTs applied to clinical populations with cognitive decline, such as those with psychiatric and brain disorders.

Invariant contexts reduce response time variability in visual search in an age-specific way: A comparison of children, teenagers, and adults

Contextual cueing is a phenomenon in which repeatedly encountered arrays of items can enhance the visual search for a target item. This is widely attributed to attentional guidance driven by contextual memory acquired during visual search. Some studies suggest that children may have an immature ability to use contextual cues compared to adults, while others argue that contextual learning capacity is similar across ages. To test the development of context-guided attention, this study compared contextual cueing effects among three age groups: adults (aged 18-33 years, N = 32), teenagers (aged 15-17 years, N = 41), and younger children (aged 8-9 years, N = 43). Moreover, this study introduced a measure of response time variability that tracks fluctuations in response time throughout the experiment, in addition to the conventional analysis of response times. The results showed that all age groups demonstrated significantly faster responses in repeated than non-repeated search contexts. Notably, adults and teenagers exhibited smaller response time variability in repeated contexts than in non-repeated ones, while younger children did not. This implies that children are less efficient at consolidating contextual information into a stable memory representation, which may lead to less stable attentional guidance during visual search.

Associative Visuomotor Learning Using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Induces Stimulus-Response Interference

Classical conditioning states that the systematic co-occurrence of a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus can cause the neutral stimulus to, over time, evoke the same response as the unconditioned stimulus. On a neural level, Hebbian learning suggests that this type of learning occurs through changes in synaptic plasticity when two neurons are simultaneously active, resulting in increased connectivity between them. Inspired by associative learning theories, we here investigated whether the mere co-activation of visual stimuli and stimulation of the primary motor cortex using TMS would result in stimulus-response associations that can impact future behavior. During a learning phase, we repeatedly paired the presentation of a specific color (but not other colors) with a TMS pulse over the motor cortex. Next, participants performed a two-alternative forced-choice task where they had to categorize simple shapes and we studied whether the shapes' task-irrelevant color (and its potentially associated involuntary motor activity) affected the required motor response. Participants showed more errors on incongruent trials for stimuli that were previously paired with high intensity TMS pulses, but only when tested on the same day. Using a drift diffusion model for conflict tasks, we further demonstrate that this interference occurred early, and gradually increased as a function of associated TMS intensity. Taken together, our findings show that the human brain can learn stimulus-response associations using externally induced motor cortex stimulation. Although we were inspired by the Hebbian learning literature, future studies should investigate whether Hebbian or other learning processes were also what brought about this effect.

Temporal properties of the speed-accuracy trade-off for arm-pointing movements in various directions around the body

Human body movements are based on the intrinsic trade-off between speed and accuracy. Fitts's law (1954) shows that the time required for movement is represented by a simple logarithmic equation and is applicable to a variety of movements. However, few studies have determined the role of the direction in modulating the performance of upper limb movements and the effects of the interactions between direction and distance and between direction and target size. This study examined the variations in temporal properties of the speed-accuracy trade-off in arm-pointing movements that directly manipulate objects according to the direction, distance, and target size. Participants performed pointing movements to the targets with 3 different sizes presented at 15 locations (5 directions and 3 distances) on a horizontal plane. Movement time (MT) for each trial in each condition was obtained. Subsequently, Mackenzie's model (1992), MT = a + b log2(D/W +1), where D and W represent the distance and width of the target, respectively, was fitted. The slope factor b, a fitted parameter in the equation, was calculated and evaluated according to the changes in the direction, distance, and target size. The results showed that MTs exhibited anisotropy in the hemifield, being the smallest in the right-forward direction. Additionally, the slope factor b, as a function of distance, was smaller in the rightward direction than in the forward and left-forward directions. These results suggest that the degree of difficulty of upper limb movements expands heterogeneously in various directions around the body.

A tutorial on using the paired t test for power calculations in repeated measures ANOVA with interactions

The a priori calculation of statistical power has become common practice in behavioral and social sciences to calculate the necessary sample size for detecting an expected effect size with a certain probability (i.e., power). In multi-factorial repeated measures ANOVA, these calculations can sometimes be cumbersome, especially for higher-order interactions. For designs that only involve factors with two levels each, the paired t test can be used for power calculations, but some pitfalls need to be avoided. In this tutorial, we provide practical advice on how to express main and interaction effects in repeated measures ANOVA as single difference variables. In particular, we demonstrate how to calculate the effect size Cohen's d of this difference variable either based on means, variances, and covariances of conditions or by transforming [Formula: see text] or [Formula: see text] from the ANOVA framework into d. With the effect size correctly specified, we then show how to use the t test for sample size considerations by means of an empirical example. The relevant R code is provided in an online repository for all example calculations covered in this article.