Correlating Gray Matter Volume with Individual Difference in the Flanker Interference Effect

Abstract

The Eriksen Flanker task has been widely used as a measurement of cognitive control, however till now information is still scarce about how the neuroanatomical properties are related to performance in this task. Using voxel-based morphometry technique (VBM), the current study identified a set of distributed areas where the gray matter volume (GM) correlated positively with participants’ efficiency in interference inhibition. These areas included the bilateral prefrontal gyri, left insula and inferior temporal gyrus, the left inferior parietal lobule. Further analysis using a novel machine learning algorithm with balanced cross-validation procedure confirmed that in these areas the GM-behavioral association was unlikely a byproduct of outlier values, instead, the gray matter volume could predict reliably participants’ interference inhibition efficiency. These results underscore the importance of the fronto-parietal and insula systems to the brain functioning of interference inhibition from the neuroanatomical perspective.

Exposing an “Intangible” Cognitive Skill among Collegiate Football Players: Enhanced Interference Control

“…That is, must an aspiring young football player possess an essential neurocognitive capacity like interference control in order to develop that particular skill through practice and training or is that basic capacity developed exclusively through practice and training? Existing research utilizing various imaging and electrophysiological techniques shows that variation in the proficiency of resolving response conflict among non-athlete healthy adults is linked to specific genetic influences, neuromodulators, and individual differences in patterns of neural activity in cognitive control circuitries ( Kopp et al, 1996 ; Casey et al, 2000 ; Hazeltine et al, 2000 ; Bunge et al, 2002 ; Forstmann et al, 2008 ; Ochsner et al, 2009 ; Badgaiyan and Wack, 2011 ; Biehl et al, 2011 ; Newman et al, 2014 ; Chen et al, 2015 ). Outside of efforts to train these skills in children and, in particular, children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, minimal work has focused on the trainability or modifiability of response conflict control skills in adults.…”

RTs across Dual Stimuli, Gender, GPA and Trialtype

“…Flanker effect has recently gained attention in research focus for several years because it is dynamic, applicable in many domains, and has various result benefits (detects cognitive degeneration that is caused by drugs, unhealthy lifestyle, and neurological disorders) (McLean et al, 2013;Atmaca, Sebanz, & Knoblich, 2011;Chen et al, 2015). Many flanker task researched have been conducted through the years with various kinds of approaches.…”

A diffusion model approach to analyzing performance on the Flanker task: The role of the DLPFC

“…Comparing good and poor performers on the Flanker task, Colcombe, Kramer, Erickson, and Scalf (2005) reported a significantly greater concentration of gray matter in a left-lateralized portion of the anterior superior frontal gyrus for high-performing seniors, but no difference in the middle frontal gyrus, ACC and SMA. On the other hand, Chen, Yang, Lai, Li, and Yuan (2015) found that mean GMV correlates with cognitive control in the bilateral prefrontal gyri, left insula, inferior temporal gyrus, and left inferior parietal lobule. The characteristics of these neural regions are not as well characterized as the ACC and DLPFC for cognitive control.…”