1. Dissociable Contributions of Goal-Relevant Evidence and Goal-Irrelevant Familiarity to Individual and Developmental Differences in Conflict Recognition
- Author
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Alexander Weigard, Takakuni Suzuki, Lena J. Skalaban, May Conley, Alexandra O. Cohen, Hugh Garavan, Mary M. Heitzeg, B. J. Casey, Chandra Sripada, and Andrew Heathcote
- Abstract
Recent studies using the diffusion decision model find that performance across many cognitive control tasks can be largely attributed to a task-general efficiency of evidence accumulation (EEA) factor that reflects individuals' ability to selectively gather evidence relevant to task goals. However, estimates of EEA from an n-back "conflict recognition" paradigm in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive DevelopmentSM (ABCD) Study, a large, diverse sample of youth, appear to contradict these findings. EEA estimates from "lure" trials--which present stimuli that are familiar (i.e., presented previously) but do not meet formal criteria for being a target--show inconsistent relations with EEA estimates from other trials and display atypical v-shaped bivariate distributions, suggesting many individuals are responding based largely on stimulus familiarity rather than goal-relevant stimulus features. We present a new formal model of evidence integration in conflict recognition tasks that distinguishes individuals' EEA for goal-relevant evidence from their use of goal-irrelevant familiarity. We then investigate developmental, cognitive, and clinical correlates of these novel parameters. Parameters for EEA and goal-irrelevant familiarity-based processing showed strong correlations across levels of n-back load, suggesting they are task-general dimensions that influence individuals' performance regardless of working memory demands. Only EEA showed large, robust developmental differences in the ABCD sample and an independent age-diverse sample. EEA also exhibited higher test-retest reliability and uniquely meaningful associations with clinically relevant dimensions. These findings establish a principled modeling framework for characterizing conflict recognition mechanisms and have several broader implications for research on individual and developmental differences in cognitive control.
- Published
- 2024
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