Functional neural architecture of cognitive control mediates the relationship between individual differences in bilingual experience and behaviour

Bilingual Spatial Cognition: Spatial Cue Use in Bilinguals and Monolinguals

“…It is, therefore, a possibility that the language switching habits of the bilingual participants contributed to the significant switch effect in the Flanker task as well as to the performance in the OiS task. A recent study by Carter and colleagues [2] found that increased frequency of language switching corresponded to reduced interference effects in the flanker task, which, in turn, was beneficial for interference control. Of note, other studies have also used the Simon task instead of the Flanker task to demonstrate the bilingual advantage [12].…”

“…The education level was matched for both groups, with all participants being university students or higher. Due to the nature of the experimental task, participants rated their gaming frequency on the following scale: never (1), once (2), less than once a year (3), less than once a month (4), less than once a week (5), several times per week (6), every day (7). The groups did not differ in the amount of time they spent playing 2D video games, t(27) = 1.23, p = 0.226.…”

“…In recent decades, bilingualism has quickly become a worldwide phenomenon spreading as a result of modern globalization. Many have argued that the use of a second language engages domain-general executive functions, leading to a 'bilingual advantage' [1][2][3], whereas others find no evidence for a bilingual advantage in executive task switching [4][5][6][7][8]. These studies, however, do not tap into the complexity of underlying cognitive processes in more real-life situations, such as navigating through known and unknown spatial environments.…”

“…This bilingual benefit is not always observed. There is an ongoing controversy in the field regarding the bilingual advantage in executive control [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8].…”

Effects of healthy ageing and bilingualism on attention networks

“…Evidently, even when there are no effects demonstrated on a performance variable, it is still possible that different functional neural mechanisms are bringing about this seemingly similar performance. In fact, both in the ageing and the bilingualism literature, this is a common observation (e.g., Carter et al, 2023;Markiewicz et al, 2023). In future studies, it may therefore be interesting to investigate the functional neural mechanisms subserving ANT performance in the context of the impact of both bilingualism and ageing.…”