Pinner John F L, Cavanagh James F
University of New, Mexico.
University of New, Mexico.
Brain Res. 2017 Oct 1;1672:73-80. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2017.07.026. Epub 2017 Aug 1.
Cognitive conflict is often experienced as a difficult, frustrating, and aversive state. Recent studies have indicated that conflict acts as an implicit cost during learning, valuation, and the instantiation of cognitive control. Here we investigated if an implicit manipulation of conflict also influences explicit decision making to risk. Participants were required to perform a Balloon Analogue Risk Task wherein the virtual balloon was inflated by performing a flankers task. By varying the percent of incongruent flanker trials between balloons, we hypothesized that participants would pump the balloon fewer times in conditions of higher conflict and that frontal midline theta would account for significant variance in this relationship. Across two studies, we demonstrate that conflict did not elicit reliable behavioral changes in this task across participants. However, individual differences in frontal theta power accounted for significant variance by predicting diminished balloon pumps. Thus, while conflict costs may act as investments to some individuals (invigorating behavior), it is aversive to others (diminishing behavior), and frontal midline theta power accounts for these varying behavioral tendencies between individuals. These findings demonstrate how frontal midline theta is not only a candidate mechanism for implementing cognitive control, but it is sensitive to the inherent costs therein.
认知冲突常常被体验为一种困难、令人沮丧且厌恶的状态。最近的研究表明，冲突在学习、评估和认知控制的实例化过程中作为一种隐性成本起作用。在此，我们研究了冲突的隐性操纵是否也会影响明确的风险决策。参与者被要求执行一项气球模拟风险任务，其中通过执行侧翼任务使虚拟气球充气。通过改变气球之间不一致侧翼试验的百分比，我们假设参与者在冲突程度较高的情况下给气球充气的次数会更少，并且额中线θ波将解释这种关系中的显著差异。在两项研究中，我们证明冲突在该任务中并未在参与者中引发可靠的行为变化。然而，额部θ波功率的个体差异通过预测气球充气次数减少解释了显著差异。因此，虽然冲突成本对一些人来说可能是一种投资（激发行为），但对另一些人来说却是厌恶的（减少行为），并且额中线θ波功率解释了个体之间这些不同的行为倾向。这些发现表明额中线θ波不仅是实施认知控制的一种候选机制，而且它对其中固有的成本敏感。
