Journal
NEUROPSYCHOLOGIA
Volume 177, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108428
Keywords
Antisaccade; Cognitive control; Emotion; Face processing; fMRI
Funding
- National Science Foundation EPSCoR [1632849]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Cognitive control plays a crucial role in task performance by selectively attending to relevant stimuli and inhibiting distraction. This study examined how contextual factors such as trial timing and emotional content interact with cognitive control using an antisaccade task. The results showed that greater BOLD activation in frontal and parietal brain regions was associated with inhibiting prepotent glance towards a peripheral stimulus. Additionally, neutral faces elicited increased attention, particularly in prosaccade and overlap trials.
Cognitive control allows individuals to flexibly and efficiently perform tasks by attending to relevant stimuli while inhibiting distraction from irrelevant stimuli. The antisaccade task assesses cognitive control by requiring participants to inhibit a prepotent glance towards a peripheral stimulus and generate an eye movement to the mirror image location. This task can be administered with various contextual manipulations to investigate how factors such as trial timing or emotional content interact with cognitive control. In the current study, 26 healthy adults completed a mixed antisaccade and prosaccade fMRI task that included task irrelevant emotional faces and gap/overlap timing. The results showed typical antisaccade and gap behavioral effects with greater BOLD activation in frontal and parietal brain regions for antisaccade and overlap trials. Conversely, there were no differences in behavior based on the emotion of the task irrelevant face, but trials with neutral faces had greater activation in widespread visual regions than trials with angry faces, particularly for prosaccade and overlap trials. Together, these effects suggest that a high level of cognitive control and inhibition was required throughout the task, minimizing the impact of the face presentation on saccade behavior, but leading to increased attention to the neutral faces on overlap prosaccade trials when both the task cue (look towards) and emotion stimulus (neutral, non-threatening) facilitated disinhibition of visual processing.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available