Department of Psychology, Chungnam National University, Daejeon 34134, Korea.
Tomography. 2022 Jul 11;8(4):1781-1790. doi: 10.3390/tomography8040150.
The present study investigated the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying smartphone/internet addiction. We tested a specific hypothesis that the excessive, uncontrolled use of smartphones should be related to the ability of controlling attention in a purely endogenous and self-regulatory manner. In an fMRI experiment, in which 43 adults participated, we had participants detect and identify specified target stimuli among non-targets. In some trials, 10 s oddball movies were presented as distractors. While the participants try to filter out the distractors and focus their attention on the main task, the activation profiles of the frontoparietal brain regions were examined. The results showed that the people with a higher risk of being addicted to smartphone use failed to filter out distractors via the endogenous control of attention. The neuroimaging data showed that the high-risk group showed significantly lower levels of activation in the frontopolar cortex (FPC). We conclude that people at a high risk of smartphone addiction have difficulty endogenously shifting their attention from distracting stimuli toward goal-directed behavior, and FPC plays a critical role in this self-regulatory control of attention.
本研究旨在探讨智能手机/网络成瘾的神经认知机制。我们提出了一个具体假设，即过度、失控地使用智能手机应该与以纯粹自主和自我调节的方式控制注意力的能力有关。在一项 fMRI 实验中，我们让 43 名成年人参与其中，让他们在非目标刺激中检测和识别指定的目标刺激。在一些试验中，10 秒的奇数电影被用作分心物。当参与者试图过滤掉分心物并将注意力集中在主要任务上时，我们检查了额顶叶大脑区域的激活情况。结果表明，有更高智能手机使用成瘾风险的人无法通过注意力的自主控制来过滤掉分心物。神经影像学数据显示，高风险组在前额极皮层（FPC）的激活水平明显较低。我们的结论是，有较高智能手机成瘾风险的人很难自主地将注意力从分散刺激转移到目标导向行为，而 FPC 在这种注意力的自我调节控制中起着关键作用。
