32 research outputs found
Shared neural representations of cognitive conflict and negative affect in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex
Influential theories of dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) function suggest that the dACC registers cognitive conflict as an aversive signal, but no study directly tested this idea. In this pre-registered human fMRI study, we used multivariate pattern analyses to identify which regions respond similarly to conflict and aversive signals. The results show that, of all conflict- and value-related regions, only the dACC/pre-SMA showed shared representations, directly supporting recent dACC theories
A direct and conceptual replication of post-loss speeding when gambling
To investigate the response to suboptimal outcomes, Verbuggen
et al. (Verbruggen F, Chambers CD, Lawrence NS, McLaren
IPL. 2017 Winning and losing: effects on impulsive action.
J. Exp. Psychol.: Hum. Percept. Perform. 43, 147. (doi:10.1037/
xhp0000284)) conducted a study in which participants chose
between a gamble and a non-gamble option. The non-gamble
option was a guaranteed amount of points, whereas the
gamble option was associated with a higher amount but a
lower probability of winning. The authors observed that
participants initiated the next trial faster after a loss compared
to wins or non-gambles. In the present study, we directly
replicated these findings in the laboratory and online. We also
designed another task controlling for the number of trials per
outcome. In this task, participants guessed where a reward
was hidden. They won points if they selected the correct
location, but lost points if they selected the incorrect location.
We included neutral trials as a baseline. Again, participants
sped up after a loss relative to wins and neutral trials (but only
with a response choice in neutral trials and a large sample
size). These findings appear inconsistent with cognitivecontrol
frameworks, which assume that suboptimal outcomes
typically lead to slower responses; instead, they suggest that
suboptimal outcomes can invigorate behaviour, consistent
with accounts of frustrative non-reward and impulsive action
A consensus guide to capturing the ability to inhibit actions and impulsive behaviors in the stop-signal task.
Response inhibition is essential for navigating everyday life. Its derailment is considered integral to numerous neurological and psychiatric disorders, and more generally, to a wide range of behavioral and health problems. Response-inhibition efficiency furthermore correlates with treatment outcome in some of these conditions. The stop-signal task is an essential tool to determine how quickly response inhibition is implemented. Despite its apparent simplicity, there are many features (ranging from task design to data analysis) that vary across studies in ways that can easily compromise the validity of the obtained results. Our goal is to facilitate a more accurate use of the stop-signal task. To this end, we provide 12 easy-to-implement consensus recommendations and point out the problems that can arise when they are not followed. Furthermore, we provide user-friendly open-source resources intended to inform statistical-power considerations, facilitate the correct implementation of the task, and assist in proper data analysis
The Affective Twitches of Task Switching: Experiment 1
Is task switching affectively tagged
Dynamic influences on static measures of metacognition
The authors show that current measures of metacognition are confounded with response caution, both in simulations and empirical data. They propose an alternative dynamic measure of metacognition
Correct responses alleviate the negative evaluation of conflict
Recent studies have demonstrated that cognitive conflict, as experienced during incongruent Stroop trials, is automatically evaluated as negative in line with theories emphasising the aversive nature of conflict. However, while this is well replicated when people only see the conflict stimuli, results are mixed when participants also respond to stimuli before evaluating them. Potentially, the positive surprise people feel when overcoming the conflict allows them to evaluate the experience as more positive. In this study, we investigated whether task experience can account for contradictory findings in the literature. Across three experiments, we observed that responding to incongruent stimuli was evaluated as negative on the first trials, but this effect disappeared after 32 trials. This contrasted with the results of a fourth experiment showing that the negative evaluation of incongruent trials did not disappear, when participants could not respond to the conflict. A re-analysis of three older experiments corroborated these results by showing that a positive evaluation of conflict only occurred after participants had some experience with the task. These results show that responding to conflict clearly changes its affective evaluation fitting with the idea that creating outcome expectancies (lower expectancies for being correct on incongruent trials) makes the experience of conflict less negative
The subjective evaluation of task switch cues is related to voluntary task switching
Task switching refers to the effortful mental process of shifting attention between different tasks. While it is well established that task switching usually comes with an objective performance cost, recent studies have shown that people also subjectively evaluate task switching as negative. An open question is whether this affective evaluation of task switching is also related to actual decision making. In this pre-registered study, we therefore examined whether individual differences in the negative evaluation of task switch cues are related to less voluntary task switching. To this end, participants first performed a cued task switching paradigm where abstract cues signaled task transitions (repetition or alternation). In a second phase, these transition cues were used as prime stimuli in an affective priming procedure to assess participants' affective evaluation of task switching. In a third phase, participants were allowed to freely choose whether to switch or repeat tasks. We found that a more negative evaluation of task switching cues was related to lower switch rates in the voluntary task switching phase. This finding supports neuroeconomic theories of value-based decision making which suggest that people use their subjective value of control to decide whether to engage in (different) tasks