Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, B203 LSRC, Box 90999, Durham, NC 27708, USA.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2012 Sep;24(9):1834-48. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_00209. Epub 2012 Feb 23.
Humans are able to continuously monitor environmental situations and adjust their behavioral strategies to optimize performance. Here we investigate the behavioral and brain adjustments that occur when conflicting stimulus elements are, or are not, temporally predictable. ERPs were collected while manual response variants of the Stroop task were performed in which the SOAs between the relevant color and irrelevant word stimulus components were either randomly intermixed or held constant within each experimental run. Results indicated that the size of both the neural and behavioral effects of stimulus incongruency varied with the temporal arrangement of the stimulus components, such that the random-SOA arrangements produced the greatest incongruency effects at the earliest irrelevant first SOA (-200 msec) and the constant-SOA arrangements produced the greatest effects with simultaneous presentation. These differences in conflict processing were accompanied by rapid (∼150 msec) modulations of the sensory ERPs to the irrelevant distractor components when they occurred consistently first. These effects suggest that individuals are able to strategically allocate attention in time to mitigate the influence of a temporally predictable distractor. As these adjustments are instantiated by the participants without instruction, they reveal a form of rapid strategic learning for dealing with temporally predictable stimulus incongruency.
人类能够持续监测环境情况，并调整行为策略以优化表现。在这里，我们研究了当冲突刺激元素在时间上可预测或不可预测时发生的行为和大脑调整。在执行 Stroop 任务的手动反应变体时收集了 ERP，其中相关颜色和不相关单词刺激成分之间的 SOA 要么随机混合，要么在每个实验运行中保持恒定。结果表明，刺激不一致的神经和行为效应的大小随刺激成分的时间排列而变化，使得随机 SOA 排列在最早的无关第一个 SOA（-200 毫秒）产生最大的不一致效应，而恒定 SOA 排列在同时呈现时产生最大的效应。这些冲突处理上的差异伴随着当它们一致地首先出现时对不相关干扰成分的快速（约 150 毫秒）感觉 ERP 调制。这些效应表明，个体能够有策略地在时间上分配注意力，以减轻时间上可预测的干扰的影响。由于这些调整是由参与者在没有指令的情况下实现的，因此它们揭示了一种快速的策略性学习形式，用于处理时间上可预测的刺激不一致性。
