Cognitive Psychology Unit, Department of Psychology, Wassenaarseweg 52, Leiden University, 2333 AK Leiden, The Netherlands.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2012 Apr;38(2):290-301. doi: 10.1037/a0026353. Epub 2011 Dec 26.
Stressful situations, the aversiveness of events, or increases in task difficulty (e.g., conflict) have repeatedly been shown to be capable of triggering attentional control adjustments. In the present study we tested whether the particularity of an fMRI testing environment (i.e., EPI noise) might result in such increases of the cognitive control exerted. We found that participants were more effective in controlling episodic retrieval of previous stimulus-response bindings (Experiment 1), in switching to a new task (Experiment 2), and shielding a current goal from distracting response tendencies (Experiment 3) if they were exposed to challenging task situations, such as 70 dB echo planar imaging noise sampled from an fMRI scanner. These findings have considerable theoretical implications in questioning the widespread assumption that people are equally devoted to easy and more challenging tasks, and methodological implications in raising the possibility that experiments carried out in fMRI scanners or under otherwise challenging conditions systematically overestimate contributions from cognitive control processes.
紧张的情况、事件的不愉快、或任务难度的增加（例如冲突）一再被证明能够引发注意力控制调整。在本研究中，我们测试了 fMRI 测试环境的特殊性（即 EPI 噪声）是否会导致这种认知控制的增加。我们发现，如果参与者暴露于具有挑战性的任务情境中，例如从 fMRI 扫描仪中采集的 70 dB 回波平面成像噪声，他们在控制情景记忆检索先前的刺激-反应绑定（实验 1）、切换到新任务（实验 2）和屏蔽当前目标的干扰反应倾向（实验 3）方面会更有效。这些发现具有重要的理论意义，它质疑了人们同样致力于简单任务和更具挑战性任务的普遍假设，并且在方法学上提出了一种可能性，即在 fMRI 扫描仪中进行的实验或在其他具有挑战性的条件下进行的实验可能会系统地高估认知控制过程的贡献。
