Gohil Krutika, Stock Ann-Kathrin, Beste Christian
Cognitive Neurophysiology, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine of the TU Dresden, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2015 Mar 30;5:9485. doi: 10.1038/srep09485.
Dual tasking or action cascading is essential in everyday life and often investigated using tasks presenting stimuli in different sensory modalities. Findings obtained with multimodal tasks are often broadly generalized, but until today, it has remained unclear whether multimodal integration affects performance in action cascading or the underlying neurophysiology. To bridge this gap, we asked healthy young adults to complete a stop-change paradigm which presented different stimuli in either one or two modalities while recording behavioral and neurophysiological data. Bimodal stimulus presentation prolonged response times and affected bottom-up and top-down guided attentional processes as reflected by the P1 and N1, respectively. However, the most important effect was the modulation of response selection processes reflected by the P3 suggesting that a potentially different way of forming task goals operates during action cascading in bimodal vs. unimodal tasks. When two modalities are involved, separate task goals need to be formed while a conjoint task goal may be generated when all stimuli are presented in the same modality. On a systems level, these processes seem to be related to the modulation of activity in fronto-polar regions (BA10) as well as Broca's area (BA44).
双重任务或动作级联在日常生活中至关重要，并且经常使用在不同感觉模态中呈现刺激的任务进行研究。通过多模态任务获得的研究结果常常被广泛推广，但直到如今，多模态整合是否会影响动作级联的表现或潜在的神经生理学仍不清楚。为了填补这一空白，我们让健康的年轻成年人完成一个停止-改变范式，该范式在记录行为和神经生理学数据的同时，以一种或两种模态呈现不同的刺激。双峰刺激呈现延长了反应时间，并分别影响了由P1和N1反映的自下而上和自上而下引导的注意过程。然而，最重要的影响是由P3反映的反应选择过程的调制，这表明在双峰与单峰任务的动作级联过程中，形成任务目标的潜在方式可能不同。当涉及两种模态时，需要形成单独的任务目标，而当所有刺激以相同模态呈现时，可能会产生联合任务目标。在系统层面，这些过程似乎与额极区（BA10）以及布洛卡区（BA44）的活动调制有关。
