Behavioral and Neural Correlates of Executive Function: Interplay between Inhibition and Updating Processes

Abstract

This study investigated the interaction between two executive function processes, inhibition and updating, through analyses of behavioral, neurophysiological, and effective connectivity metrics. Although, many studies have focused on behavioral effects of executive function processes individually, few studies have examined the dynamic causal interactions between these two functions. A total of twenty participants from a local university performed a dual task combing flanker and n-back experimental paradigms, and completed the Operation Span Task designed to measure working memory capacity. We found that both behavioral (accuracy and reaction time) and neurophysiological (P300 amplitude and alpha band power) metrics on the inhibition task (i.e., flanker task) were influenced by the updating load (n-back level) and modulated by working memory capacity. Using independent component analysis, source localization (DIPFIT), and Granger Causality analysis of the EEG time-series data, the present study demonstrated that manipulation of cognitive demand in a dual executive function task influenced the causal neural network. We compared connectivity across three updating loads (n-back levels) and found that experimental manipulation of working memory load enhanced causal connectivity of a large-scale neurocognitive network. This network contains the prefrontal and parietal cortices, which are associated with inhibition and updating executive function processes. This study has potential applications in human performance modeling and assessment of mental workload, such as the design of training materials and interfaces for those performing complex multitasking under stress.

Exploration of gray matter correlates of cognitive training benefit in adolescents with chronic traumatic brain injury

“…We obtained the morphological metrics using the Desikan-Killiany atlas (Desikan et al, 2006). Several MRI and lesion studies offer a large body of evidence that executive functioning (EF) depends on a central executive network (Bettcher et al, 2016; Kim et al, 2017; Nowrangi et al, 2014) including the following important gray matter areas: the prefrontal and parietal cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex (Menon and Uddin, 2010) and basal ganglia (Brooks et al, 2016; Ware et al, 2016). Based on these previous findings, we selected 9 bilateral cortical-subcortical regions of interest (EF-ROIs): the superior frontal gyrus, caudal part of the middle frontal gyrus, rostral part of the middle frontal gyrus, superior parietal gyrus, inferior parietal gyrus, anterior cingulate gyrus, caudate nucleus, putamen and thalamus.…”

Neural Correlates of Workload Transition in Multitasking: An ACT-R Model of Hysteresis Effect

“…In this study, a multivariate autoregressive model (MVAR) was fit to the ensemble-normalized ICs using the Vieira-Morf algorithm with a 350 ms window length, 30 step size, and 16 model order. Model order was optimized from 1 to 40 such that the Hannan-Quinn criterion for each participant was minimized (Kim et al, 2017). Then the optimized model order values were averaged across all participants.…”

Memory of Ensemble Representation Was Independent of Attention

“…The flanker tasks (Eriksen and Eriksen, 1974, e.g., arrows) have been well tested to be attention-demanding (Fan et al., 2002) and be used in dual-task paradigm (Cosman and Vecera, 2009; Kim et al., 2017; Wendt et al., 2017). Arrow flanker task requires participants to focus on the target arrow while simultaneously ignoring competing information from distracting stimuli, which referred to selective attention.…”