Brown Verity J, Tait David S
School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, St Mary's Quad, South St, St Andrews, Fife, KY16 9JP, Scotland, UK.
Curr Top Behav Neurosci. 2016;28:363-95. doi: 10.1007/7854_2015_5002.
Attentional set-shifting, as a measure of executive flexibility, has been a staple of investigations into human cognition for over six decades. Mediated by the frontal cortex in mammals, the cognitive processes involved in forming, maintaining and shifting an attentional set are vulnerable to dysfunction arising from a number of human neurodegenerative diseases (such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases) and other neurological disorders (such as schizophrenia, depression, and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder). Our understanding of these diseases and disorders, and the cognitive impairments induced by them, continues to advance, in tandem with an increasing number of tools at our disposal. In this chapter, we review and compare commonly used attentional set-shifting tasks (the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task and Intradimensional/Extradimensional tasks) and their applicability across species. In addition to humans, attentional set-shifting has been observed in a number of other animals, with a substantial body of literature describing performance in monkeys and rodents. We consider the task designs used to investigate attentional set-shifting in these species and the methods used to model human diseases and disorders, and ultimately the comparisons and differences between species-specific tasks, and between performance across species.
作为执行灵活性的一种衡量方式，注意力集转移在六十多年来一直是人类认知研究的主要内容。在哺乳动物中由额叶皮层介导，形成、维持和转移注意力集所涉及的认知过程容易受到多种人类神经退行性疾病（如阿尔茨海默病、帕金森病和亨廷顿病）以及其他神经障碍（如精神分裂症、抑郁症和注意力缺陷多动障碍）所引发的功能障碍的影响。随着我们可利用的工具越来越多，我们对这些疾病和障碍以及它们所引发的认知障碍的理解也在不断进步。在本章中，我们回顾并比较常用的注意力集转移任务（威斯康星卡片分类任务和维度内/维度间任务）及其在不同物种中的适用性。除了人类之外，在许多其他动物中也观察到了注意力集转移，有大量文献描述了猴子和啮齿动物在该任务中的表现。我们考虑用于研究这些物种注意力集转移的任务设计以及用于模拟人类疾病和障碍的方法，最终探讨物种特异性任务之间以及不同物种表现之间的比较和差异。
