The Dual Mechanisms of Cognitive Control (DMCC) project: Validation of an on-line behavioral task battery

Abstract

Cognitive control serves a crucial role in human higher mental functions. The Dual Mechanisms of Control (DMC) account provides a unifying theoretical framework that decomposes cognitive control into two qualitatively distinct mechanisms – proactive control and reactive control. While prior behavioral and neuroimaging work has demonstrated the validity of individual tasks in isolating these two mechanisms of control, there has not been a comprehensive, theoretically-guided task battery specifically designed to tap into proactive and reactive control across different domains of cognition. To address this critical limitation and provide useful methodological tools for future investigations, the Dual Mechanisms of Cognitive Control (DMCC) task battery was developed to probe these two control modes, as well as their intra-individual and inter-individual differences, across four prototypical domains of cognition: selective attention, context processing, multi-tasking, and working memory. We present this task battery, along with detailed descriptions of the experimental manipulations used to encourage shifts to proactive or reactive control in each of the four task domains. We rigorously evaluate the group effects of these manipulations in primary indices of proactive and reactive control, establishing the validity of the DMCC task battery in providing dissociable yet convergent measures of the two cognitive control modes.

Working memory capacity preferentially enhances implementation of proactive control.

“…To maintain focus and tractability, we circumscribe descriptive reporting to only the predicted effects below. In particular, we do not provide descriptive or psychometric characteristics of the full AX-CPT task data here, because these are the focus of two additional reports on the DMCC battery (Snijder et al, 2022; Tang et al, 2021).…”

“…Specifically, Rosales et al (2022) used no-go trials to induce reactive control, whereas here we implemented an item-specific cueing approach for reactive control, while including no-go trials across all conditions. As detailed elsewhere (Braver et al, 2021; Tang et al, 2021), the purpose of this change was to explicitly distinguish selective enhancement of reactive control from reduced engagement of proactive control (i.e., the effect of no-go trials)—our baseline condition was therefore equivalent to the reactive condition in Rosales and colleague’s study. Consequently, the experimental distinctions across the control conditions, in combination with our aggregated trial-level mixed modeling approach (designed specifically to assess for session-level interactions) may have increased performance variability and enhanced sensitivity to detect relationships between WMC and proactive control.…”

“…Two-hundred seventy-eight participants were recruited via the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) online platform. Data collection DUAL MECHANISMS OF COGNITIVE CONTROL was completed in March 2018 and included two rounds of testing, during which participants completed a retest assessment several weeks after initial testing (see Tang et al, 2021, for details of the full study protocol). Of this recruited set, 140 participants failed to complete the full study protocol because they either did not complete the sessions on time, experienced prohibitive technical issues, or failed to comply with task instructions.…”

“…Reactive Session. The reactive session featured a new AX-CPT variant that was adopted to preferentially encourage and enhance use of reactive control (for further discussion of this version see Braver et al, 2021;Tang et al, 2021). High conflict trials (AY, BX, no-go) were preceded by a unique border color and further accentuated by placing the probe in a distinct spatial location.…”

Experimental Manipulation of Guided Attention to the Shoulder Movement Task in Clinical Dohsa-hou Induces Shifts in the Reactive Mode and Indicates Flexible Cognitive Control Performance

“…Online versions of stress management applications of the relaxation movement tasks or online Dohsa-hou for pandemic stress management ( Kamikura and Shimizu, 2021 ) might open the practice up to more diverse populations. The authors will make efforts to make the standardized guided attention task used in the experiment available in English for scholars of cognitive control in order to coordinate replication effect sizes in future studies, such as task battery validation projects on the DMC framework ( Braver et al, 2021 ; Tang et al, 2021 ).…”