Krukow Paweł, Plechawska-Wójcik Małgorzata, Podkowiński Arkadiusz
Department of Clinical Neuropsychiatry, Medical University of Lublin, ul. Głuska 1, 20-439 Lublin, Poland.
Institute of Computer Science, Lublin University of Technology, ul. Nadbystrzycka 38A, 20-618 Lublin, Poland.
Brain Sci. 2021 May 20;11(5):669. doi: 10.3390/brainsci11050669.
Aggrandized fluctuations in the series of reaction times (RTs) are a very sensitive marker of neurocognitive disorders present in neuropsychiatric populations, pathological ageing and in patients with acquired brain injury. Even though it was documented that processing inconsistency founds a background of higher-order cognitive functions disturbances, there is a vast heterogeneity regarding types of task used to compute RT-related variability, which impedes determining the relationship between elementary and more complex cognitive processes. Considering the above, our goal was to develop a relatively new assessment method based on a simple reaction time paradigm, conducive to eliciting a controlled range of intra-individual variability. It was hypothesized that performance variability might be induced by manipulation of response-stimulus interval's length and regularity. In order to verify this hypothesis, a group of 107 healthy students was tested using a series of digitalized tasks and their results were analyzed using parametric and ex-Gaussian statistics of RTs distributional markers. In general, these analyses proved that intra-individual variability might be evoked by a given type of response-stimulus interval manipulation even when it is applied to the simple reaction time task. Collected outcomes were discussed with reference to neuroscientific concepts of attentional resources and functional neural networks.
反应时间（RTs）序列中夸大的波动是神经精神疾病患者、病理性衰老患者和后天性脑损伤患者中存在的神经认知障碍的一个非常敏感的指标。尽管有文献记载，处理不一致是高阶认知功能障碍的一个背景，但用于计算与RT相关变异性的任务类型存在很大的异质性，这阻碍了确定基本认知过程和更复杂认知过程之间的关系。考虑到上述情况，我们的目标是开发一种基于简单反应时间范式的相对较新的评估方法，有助于引发个体内部变异性的可控范围。据推测，反应-刺激间隔的长度和规律性的操纵可能会导致表现变异性。为了验证这一假设，一组107名健康学生使用一系列数字化任务进行了测试，并使用RTs分布标记的参数统计和前高斯统计对他们的结果进行了分析。总体而言，这些分析证明，即使将特定类型的反应-刺激间隔操纵应用于简单反应时间任务，也可能会引发个体内部变异性。结合注意力资源和功能性神经网络的神经科学概念对收集到的结果进行了讨论。
