Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
Neurosci Lett. 2011 Feb 25;490(2):101-6. doi: 10.1016/j.neulet.2010.12.035. Epub 2010 Dec 21.
Conflict control is an important cognitive ability in human behavioral regulation. The Eriksen flanker task was employed to explore the neural correlation between conflict control and intelligence with the aid of event-related potential (ERP) techniques. Two groups of early adolescents with different intellectual levels participated in the current study (an intellectually gifted group of 20 children vs. an intellectually average group of 21 children, with mean scores of 43 vs. 35.7 in Cattell's Culture Fair Test, respectively). Behavioral results indicate that the gifted children had better conflict control performances, with increased accuracy and faster response speeds than the intellectually average children. Electrophysiological results further show that the gifted children had more efficient N2 activations during conflict monitoring processing, faster P3 responses over frontal regions, and stronger P3 activations over central-parietal regions during attentional control processing. The difference waveform analysis showed that the gifted children had the weakest N2d activations when elicited by multiple conflicts. N2d amplitudes can be used to distinguish a stimulus conflict from a response conflict, and P3d amplitudes can be used to separate multiple conflicts from a single conflict. The results support the neural efficiency hypothesis of intelligence and shed light on the close relationship between conflict control ability and human intelligence.
冲突控制是人类行为调节中的一种重要认知能力。本研究采用艾森克范式（Eriksen flanker task），借助事件相关电位（ERP）技术，探讨了冲突控制与智力的神经关联。两组不同智力水平的青少年早期被试（智力超常组 20 名儿童，智力平均组 21 名儿童，卡特尔文化公平测验的平均分数分别为 43 分和 35.7 分）参与了当前研究。行为结果表明，超常组儿童的冲突控制表现更好，准确性更高，反应速度更快。电生理结果进一步表明，在冲突监测处理过程中，超常组儿童的 N2 激活更为有效；在注意控制处理过程中，前额区域的 P3 反应更快，中央顶叶区域的 P3 激活更强。差异波分析表明，在多个冲突引发时，超常组儿童的 N2d 激活最弱。N2d 振幅可用于区分刺激冲突和反应冲突，而 P3d 振幅可用于区分多个冲突和单个冲突。研究结果支持了智力的神经效率假说，并揭示了冲突控制能力与人类智力之间的密切关系。
