Department of Biological and Medical Psychology, University of Bergen, Norway.
University of East London, London, UK.
Physiol Behav. 2019 Nov 1;211:112657. doi: 10.1016/j.physbeh.2019.112657. Epub 2019 Aug 21.
It has been hypothesized that resting state cardiac vagal activity (CVA) - an indicator of parasympathetic nervous system activity - is a specific psychophysiological marker of executive control function. Here, we propose an alternative hypothesis - that CVA is associated with early stage attention orientation, promoting the flexible uptake of new information, on which the later operation of such executive control functions depends. We therefore predicted that CVA would predict the interaction between orienting and executive control. This was tested using the revised version of the Attention Network Test (ANT-R) that was developed to distinguish between orienting and executive attention during a stimulus conflict task.
Healthy adults (N = 48) performed the ANT-R and their resting CVA was measured over a 5 min period using ECG recordings.
Multiple regression analyses indicated that, when other factors were controlled for, CVA was more strongly associated with the interaction between the orienting and executive control terms than with either factor individually.
Higher levels of CVA are specifically implicated in the modulation of executive control by intrinsic orientation operating at early stages of conflict detection. These initial findings of higher CVA on orienting attention in conflict detection need to be replicated in larger samples.
有人假设静息状态下的心脏迷走神经活动（CVA）——副交感神经系统活动的一个指标——是执行控制功能的特定心理生理标志物。在这里，我们提出了另一种假设——CVA 与注意定向的早期阶段有关，促进了对新信息的灵活吸收，而这些新信息是后来执行控制功能运作的基础。因此，我们预测 CVA 将预测定向和执行控制之间的相互作用。这是通过使用注意力网络测试（ANT-R）的修订版来测试的，该测试旨在区分刺激冲突任务期间的定向和执行注意。
健康成年人（N=48）进行了 ANT-R 测试，并使用心电图记录在 5 分钟的时间内测量他们的静息 CVA。
多元回归分析表明，当控制其他因素时，CVA 与定向和执行控制因素之间的相互作用的相关性比与任何一个因素的相关性都要强。
更高水平的 CVA 特别参与了在冲突检测早期阶段由内在定向作用对执行控制的调节。在更大的样本中需要复制冲突检测中更高 CVA 对定向注意力的这些初步发现。
