Department of Psychiatry, Seoul St. Mary's Hospital, The Catholic University of Korea College of Medicine, Seoul, 06591, Republic of Korea.
Department of Psychiatry, SMG-SNU Boramae Medical Center, Seoul, 07061, Republic of Korea.
Transl Psychiatry. 2021 Feb 18;11(1):129. doi: 10.1038/s41398-021-01246-5.
As a portable media device that enables ubiquitous access to friends and entertainment, smartphones are inextricably linked with our lives. Although there is growing concern about the detrimental effect of problematic smartphone use on attentional control, the underlying neural mechanisms of impaired attentional control in problematic smartphone users (PSU) has yet to be investigated. Using a modified cognitive conflict task, we examined behavioral performance in the presence of distracting words during functional magnetic resonance imaging in 33 PSU and 33 control participants (CON). Compared with the CON group, the PSU group demonstrated impaired performance that was accompanied by constantly enhanced but not differentiated activation in the frontoparietal regions across all conditions, regardless of distractor saliency. The inferior parietal lobule (IPL) activation in the PSU group, in particular, showed an association with performance deficits in the distractor conditions. Furthermore, the PSU group exhibited decreased functional connectivity of the right IPL with the right superior temporal gyrus of the ventral attention system in the attention-demanding condition relative to the easiest condition, which was associated with the severe dependence on smartphone use. Our findings suggest that greater distractibility in the PSU group during the attentional control task may be associated with inefficient recruitment of the ventral attention network involved in bottom-up attentional processing, as indicated by hyperactivation but less coherence within the network. The present study provides evidence for understanding the neural mechanisms underlying the impaired ability to keep attention from being oriented to task-irrelevant stimuli observed in PSU.
作为一种能够随时随地访问朋友和娱乐的便携式媒体设备，智能手机与我们的生活息息相关。虽然人们越来越关注有问题的智能手机使用对注意力控制的不利影响，但有问题的智能手机使用者（PSU）注意力控制受损的潜在神经机制尚未得到研究。我们使用改良的认知冲突任务，在 33 名 PSU 和 33 名对照组参与者（CON）进行功能磁共振成像的同时，检查了在存在干扰词的情况下的行为表现。与 CON 组相比，PSU 组表现出受损的表现，伴随着在所有条件下始终增强但没有分化的额顶叶区域的激活，无论干扰物的显著程度如何。特别是，PSU 组的下顶叶区域（IPL）的激活与干扰条件下的表现缺陷有关。此外，与最简单的条件相比，PSU 组在注意力要求高的条件下，右侧 IPL 与腹侧注意系统的右侧上颞叶之间的功能连接减少，这与对智能手机的严重依赖有关。我们的研究结果表明，在注意力控制任务中，PSU 组的注意力分散性较大，可能与涉及自上而下注意力处理的腹侧注意网络的效率低下有关，表现为网络内的过度激活但缺乏一致性。本研究为理解 PSU 中观察到的无法将注意力集中在与任务无关的刺激上的能力受损的神经机制提供了证据。
