Social Exclusion Modulates Priorities of Attention Allocation in Cognitive Control

Many studies have investigated how exclusion affects cognitive control and have reported inconsistent results. However, these studies usually treated cognitive control as a unitary concept, whereas it actually involved two main sub-processes: conflict detection and response implementation. Furthermore, existing studies have focused primarily on exclusion’s effects on conscious cognitive control, while recent studies have shown the existence of unconscious cognitive control. Therefore, the present study investigated whether and how exclusion affects the sub-processes underlying conscious and unconscious cognitive control differently. The Cyberball game was used to manipulate social exclusion and participants subsequently performed a masked Go/No-Go task during which event-related potentials were measured. For conscious cognitive control, excluded participants showed a larger N2 but smaller P3 effects than included participants, suggesting that excluded people invest more attention in conscious conflict detection, but less in conscious inhibition of impulsive responses. However, for unconscious cognitive control, excluded participants showed a smaller N2 but larger P3 effects than included participants, suggesting that excluded people invest less attention in unconscious conflict detection, but more in unconscious inhibition of impulsive responses. Together, these results suggest that exclusion causes people to rebalance attention allocation priorities for cognitive control according to a more flexible and adaptive strategy

The Divergent Effects of Fear and Disgust on Inhibitory Control: An ERP Study

<div><p>Negative emotional stimuli have been shown to attract attention and impair executive control. However, two different types of unpleasant stimuli, fearful and disgusting, are often inappropriately treated as a single category in the literature on inhibitory control. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate the divergent effects of fearful and disgusting distracters on inhibitory control (both conscious and unconscious inhibition). Specifically, participants were engaged in a masked Go/No-Go task superimposed on fearful, disgusting, or neutral emotional contexts, while event-related potentials were measured concurrently. The results showed that for both conscious and unconscious conditions, disgusting stimuli elicited a larger P2 than fearful ones, and the difference waves of P3 amplitude under disgusting contexts were smaller than that under fearful contexts. These results suggest that disgusting distracters consume more attentional resources and therefore impair subsequent inhibitory control to a greater extent. This study is the first to provide electrophysiological evidence that fear and disgust differently affect inhibitory control. These results expand our understanding of the relationship between emotions and inhibitory control.</p></div

Subjective Ratings of Stimuli and Behavioural Results for Go/No-Go Stimuli.

<p>RT, reaction time.</p><p>Subjective Ratings of Stimuli and Behavioural Results for Go/No-Go Stimuli.</p

Influence of Supraliminal Reward Information on Unconsciously Triggered Response Inhibition

<div><p>Although executive functions (e.g., response inhibition) are often thought to interact consciously with reward, recent studies have demonstrated that they can also be triggered by unconscious stimuli. Further research has suggested a close relationship between consciously and unconsciously triggered response inhibition. To date, however, the effect of reward on unconsciously triggered response inhibition has not been explored. To address this issue, participants in this study performed runs of a modified Go/No-Go task during which they were exposed to both high and low value monetary rewards presented both supraliminally and subliminally. Participants were informed that they would earn the reward displayed if they responded correctly to each trial of the run. According to the results, when rewards were presented supraliminally, a greater unconsciously triggered response inhibition was observed for high-value rewards than for low-value rewards. In contrast, when rewards were presented subliminally, no enhanced unconsciously triggered response inhibition was observed. Results revealed that supraliminal and subliminal rewards have distinct effects on unconsciously triggered response inhibition. These findings have important implications for extending our understanding of the relationship between reward and response inhibition.</p></div

Procedure and design of Experiments.

<p>Participants were engaged in a masked Go/No-Go task superimposed on fearful, disgusting, or neutral emotional contexts.</p

The ERP Results for Weakly Masked Condition.

<p>(A) The averaged ERP under different emotional contexts; (B) P2 amplitude under different emotional contexts; (C) P3 amplitude under different emotional contexts; (D) The difference waves (no-go condition minus go condition) of P3 amplitude under different emotional contexts.</p

The percentage of correct runs as a function of reward value and reward presentation duration.

<p>High rewards and low rewards have no significant difference in effect on percentage of correct run when presented subliminally (left panel). High rewards elicited higher percentage of correct runs than low rewards when presented supraliminally (right panel). Error bars represent standard errors of the mean.</p

RT slowing as a function of reward value and reward presentation duration.

<p>High rewards and low rewards have no significant difference in effect on RT slowing when presented subliminally (left panel). High rewards elicited larger amount of RT slowing than low rewards when presented supraliminally (right panel). Error bars represent standard errors of the mean.</p

Experimental design.

<p>Participants were informed that, if they responded correctly to each of the 32 trials in a Go/No-Go task (B), they would receive the reward that was displayed at the beginning of the run (A). Participants were instructed that cumulative earnings would appear at the end of each run (C). Each run included 16 weakly masked trials and 16 strongly masked trials.</p