Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, Queen Square Institute of Neurology, UK.
Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, Queen Square Institute of Neurology, UK.
Neuropsychologia. 2023 Jun 6;184:108562. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2023.108562. Epub 2023 Apr 18.
This paper aims to integrate some key constructs in the cognitive neuroscience of cognitive control and executive function by formalising the notion of cognitive (or mental) effort in terms of active inference. To do so, we call upon a task used in neuropsychology to assess impulse inhibition-a Stroop task. In this task, participants must suppress the impulse to read a colour word and instead report the colour of the text of the word. The Stroop task is characteristically effortful, and we unpack a theory of mental effort in which, to perform this task accurately, participants must overcome prior beliefs about how they would normally act. However, our interest here is not in overt action, but in covert (mental) action. Mental actions change our beliefs but have no (direct) effect on the outside world-much like deploying covert attention. This account of effort as mental action lets us generate multimodal (choice, reaction time, and electrophysiological) data of the sort we might expect from a human participant engaging in this task. We analyse how parameters determining cognitive effort influence simulated responses and demonstrate that-when provided only with performance data-these parameters can be recovered, provided they are within a certain range.
本文旨在通过形式化主动推断中的认知（或心理）努力的概念，将认知神经科学中认知控制和执行功能的一些关键结构整合起来。为此，我们调用了神经心理学中用于评估冲动抑制的任务——Stroop 任务。在这个任务中，参与者必须抑制阅读颜色词的冲动，而是报告单词文本的颜色。Stroop 任务的特点是费力的，我们提出了一种心理努力的理论，在这个理论中，为了准确完成这个任务，参与者必须克服他们通常会如何行动的先验信念。然而，我们在这里的兴趣不是在明显的行动，而是在隐蔽的（心理）行动。心理行动改变了我们的信念，但对外部世界没有（直接）影响——就像部署隐蔽注意力一样。这种将努力视为心理行动的解释让我们生成了多模态（选择、反应时间和电生理）数据，这些数据可能是我们期望参与这项任务的人类参与者产生的。我们分析了确定认知努力的参数如何影响模拟响应，并证明了——当仅提供性能数据时——只要这些参数在一定范围内，就可以恢复这些参数。
