Department of Information Environment, Tokyo Denki University, Chiba, Japan.
Department of Psychology, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan.
PLoS One. 2018 Oct 29;13(10):e0206605. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0206605. eCollection 2018.
Society is aging worldwide. To promote the health and quality of life in elderly people, we must find a way to enhance and improve cognitive function, especially inhibitory function that suppresses inappropriate behaviors. Previous studies have indicated that warm-up cognitive activities enhanced the activation of appropriate behavior. As with the activation of appropriate behavior, inhibitory function is expected to be enhanced by a warm-up activity, although this theory has not yet been directly tested. Here, we investigated whether inhibitory function in a task was enhanced by a warm-up activity. We used a Navon task as a warm-up activity, in which reading small letters (local Navon task) required inhibitory function more than reading a large letter (global Navon task). The Stroop task was used as the subsequent task. Our results showed that the accuracy of the Stroop task after the local Navon task was higher than after the global Navon task. This outcome suggests that inhibitory function in the Stroop task was enhanced by the local Navon task, which was an inhibitory warm-up cognitive activity. Moreover, this study contributes to the development of new techniques of cognitive training to prevent the decline in inhibitory function during aging or other clinical scenarios, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
社会正在老龄化。为了提高老年人的健康和生活质量，我们必须找到一种方法来增强和改善认知功能，特别是抑制功能，以抑制不当行为。先前的研究表明，热身认知活动增强了适当行为的激活。与适当行为的激活一样，预计热身活动会增强抑制功能，尽管这一理论尚未得到直接验证。在这里，我们研究了热身活动是否会增强任务中的抑制功能。我们使用 Navon 任务作为热身活动，其中阅读小写字母（局部 Navon 任务）比阅读大写字母（全局 Navon 任务）需要更多的抑制功能。Stroop 任务被用作后续任务。我们的结果表明，在进行局部 Navon 任务后，Stroop 任务的准确性高于进行全局 Navon 任务后。这一结果表明，局部 Navon 任务增强了 Stroop 任务中的抑制功能，这是一种抑制性热身认知活动。此外，这项研究为认知训练新技术的发展做出了贡献，以防止在衰老或其他临床情况下抑制功能的下降，例如注意力缺陷/多动障碍（ADHD）。
