Search

Bilateral transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) - a non-invasive neuromodulation technique – has been investigated as a safe and feasible technique to treat many neuropsychiatric conditions. such as epilepsy, depression, anxiety, and chronic pain. Our aim is to investigate the effect of taVNS on neurophysiological processes during emotional and Go/No-Go tasks, and changes in frontal alpha asymmetry. We performed a randomized, double-blind, sham-controlled trial with 44 healthy individuals who were allocated into two groups (the active taVNS group and the sham taVNS group). Subjects received one session of taVNS (active or sham) for 60 min. QEEG was recorded before and after the interventions, and the subjects were assessed while exposed to emotional conditions with sad and happy facial expressions, followed by a Go/No-Go trial. The results demonstrated a significant increase in N2 amplitude in the No-Go condition for the active taVNS post-intervention compared to the sham taVNS after adjusting by handedness, mood, and fatigue levels (p = 0.046), significantly reduced ERD during sad conditions after treatment (p = 0.037), and increased frontal alpha asymmetry towards the right frontal hemisphere during the emotional task condition (p = 0.046). Finally, we observed an interesting neural signature in this study that suggests a bottom-up modulation from brainstem/subcortical to cortical areas as characterized by improved lateralization of alpha oscillations towards the frontal right hemisphere, and changes in ERP during emotional and Go/No-Go tasks that suggests a better subcortical response to the tasks. Such bottom-up effects may mediate some of the clinical effects of taVNS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractIntroductionMethodResultsDiscussionMemory deficits are the primary symptom in amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (aMCI); however, executive function (EF) deficits are common. The current study examined EF in aMCI based upon amyloid status (A+/A−) and regional atrophy in signature areas of Alzheimer’s disease (AD).Participants included 110 individuals with aMCI (A+ = 66; A− = 44) and 33 cognitively healthy participants (HP). EF was assessed using four neuropsychological assessment measures. The cortical thickness of the AD signature areas was calculated using structural MRI data.A + had greater EF deficits and cortical atrophy relative to A − in the supramarginal gyrus and superior parietal lobule. A − had greater EF deficits relative to HP, but no difference in signature area cortical thickness.The current study found that the degree of EF deficits in aMCI are a function of amyloid status and cortical thinning in the parietal cortex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a severe psychiatric disorder marked by extreme weight control behaviors and significant impacts on physical and psychosocial health. This study explores the relationship between vitamin D (Vit-D) levels and impulsivity in women with AN. Forty-six cisgender White women participants were assessed upon admission and before discharge from a specialized eating disorder treatment center, with an average duration of 2.5 ± 0.10 months. Methods included self-reported questionnaires and behavioral tasks to measure impulsivity, alongside serum Vit-D levels. Our results showed significant improvements in Vit-D levels and certain impulsivity measures, such as faster reaction times and fewer errors on the go/no-go task, correlating with higher Vit-D levels. However, no significant correlations were found between Vit-D levels and self-reported impulsivity. These findings suggest that adequate Vit-D levels may enhance cognitive functions related to impulse control in AN. Given this study's limitations, including its exclusive focus on women and small sample size, future research should involve larger, more diverse populations and randomized clinical trials to better understand the causal relationships and therapeutic potential of Vit-D in managing AN-related impulsivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early childhood is characterized by robust developmental changes in cognitive control. However, our understanding of intra-individual change in neural indices of cognitive control during this period remains limited. Here, we examined developmental changes in event-related potential (ERP) indices of cognitive control from preschool through first grade, in a large and diverse sample of children (N = 257). We recorded ERPs during a visual Go/No-Go task. N2 and P3b mean amplitudes were extracted from the observed waveforms (Go and No-Go) and the difference wave (No-Go minus Go, or ∆). Latent growth curve modeling revealed that while N2 Go and No-Go amplitudes showed no linear change, P3b Go and No-Go amplitudes displayed linear decreases in magnitude (became less positive) over time. ∆N2 amplitude demonstrated a linear increase in magnitude (became more negative) over time whereas ∆P3b amplitude was more positive in kindergarten compared to preschool. Younger age in preschool predicted greater rates of change in ∆N2 amplitude, and higher maternal education predicted larger initial P3b Go and No-Go amplitudes in preschool. Our findings suggest that observed waveforms and difference waves are not interchangeable for indexing neurodevelopment, and the developmental trajectories of different ERP indices of cognitive control are component-specific in early childhood.

Response inhibition deficits in schizophrenia (SZ) are accompanied by reduced neural activities using event‐related potential (ERP) measurements. However, it remains unclear whether the reduction in inhibition‐related ERPs in SZ is contingent upon prepotent motor tendencies. This study aimed to examine the relationship between ERP markers of prepotent motor activity (lateralised readiness potential, LRP) and response inhibition (P3) by collecting behavioural and EEG data from healthy control (HC) subjects and SZ patients during a modified Go/No‐Go task. A trial‐averaged analysis revealed that SZ patients made more commission errors in No‐Go trials compared with HC subjects, although there was no significant difference in the inhibition‐related P3 effect (i.e. larger P3 amplitudes in No‐Go compared with Go trials) between the two groups. Subsequently, No‐Go trials were sorted and median‐split into bins of stronger and weaker motor tendencies. Both HC and SZ participants made more commission errors when faced with stronger motor tendencies. The LRP‐sorted P3 data indicated that HC subjects exhibited larger P3 effects in response to stronger motor tendencies, whereas this trial‐by‐trial association between P3 and motor tendencies was absent in SZ patients. Furthermore, SZ patients displayed diminished P3 effects in No‐Go trials with stronger motor tendencies but not in trials with weaker motor tendencies, relative to HC subjects. Taken together, these findings suggest that SZ patients are unable to dynamically adjust inhibition‐related neural activities in response to changing inhibitory control demands and emphasise the importance of considering prepotent motor activity when investigating the neural mechanisms underlying response inhibition deficits in SZ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The widespread use of surgical masks during the COVID-19 pandemic has posed challenges in interpreting facial emotions. As the mouth is known to play a crucial role in decoding emotional expressions, its covering is likely to affect this process. Recent evidence suggests that facial expressions impact behavioral responses only when their emotional content is relevant to subjects' goals. Thus, this study investigates whether and how masked emotional faces alter such a phenomenon. Methods: Forty participants completed two reaching versions of the Go/No-go task in a counterbalanced fashion. In the Emotional Discrimination Task (EDT), participants were required to respond to angry, fearful, or happy expressions by performing a reaching movement and withholding it when a neutral face was presented. In the Gender Discrimination Task (GDT), the same images were shown, but participants had to respond according to the poser's gender. The face stimuli were presented in two conditions: covered by a surgical mask (masked) or without any covering (unmasked). Results: Consistent with previous studies, valence influenced behavioral control in the EDT but not in the GDT. Nevertheless, responses to facial emotions in the EDT exhibited significant differences between unmasked and masked conditions. In the former, angry expressions led to a slowdown in participants' responses. Conversely, in the masked condition, behavioral reactions were impacted by fearful and, to a greater extent, by happy expressions. Responses to fearful faces were slower, and those to happy faces exhibited increased variability in the masked condition compared to the unmasked condition. Furthermore, response accuracy to masked happy faces dramatically declined compared to the unmasked condition and other masked emotions. Discussion: In sum, our findings indicate that surgical masks disrupt reactions to emotional expressions, leading people to react less accurately and with heightened variability to happy expressions, provided that the emotional dimension is relevant to people's goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inhibitory control performance may differ greatly as a function of individual differences such as anxiety. Nonetheless, how cognitive control proficiency might be influenced by exposure to various environments and how anxiety traits might impact these effects remain unexplored. A cohort of thirty healthy volunteers participated in the study. Participants performed a Go/No-Go task before exposure to a 'forest' and 'urban' virtual environment, in a counterbalanced design, before repeating the GNG task. The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) was finally filled-in. Our findings unveiled an initial negative correlation between anxiety trait levels and GNG task performance, consistent with the established literature attributing difficulties in inhibitory functionality to anxiety. Additionally, different environmental exposures reported opposite trends. Exposure to the 'forest' environment distinctly improved the GNG performance in relation to anxiety traits, while the 'urban' setting demonstrated adverse effects on task performance. These results underscore the intricate relationship among cognitive control, environmental exposure, and trait anxiety. In particular, our findings highlight the potential of natural settings, such as forests, to mitigate the impact of anxiety on inhibition. This might have implications for interventions aimed at improving cognitive control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivation to seek social interactions is inherent to all social species. For instance, even with risk of disease transmission in a recent pandemic, humans sought out frequent in-person social interactions. In other social animals, socialization can be prioritized even over water or food consumption. Zebra finches, Taeniopygia guttata , are highly gregarious songbirds widely used in behavioural and physiological research. Songbirds, like humans, are vocal learners during development, which rely on intense auditory learning. Aside from supporting song learning, auditory learning further supports individual identification, mate choice and outcome associations in songbirds. To study auditory learning in a laboratory setting, studies often employ operant paradigms with food restriction and reinforcement and require complete social isolation, which can result in stress and other unintended physiological consequences for social species. Thus, in this work, we designed an operant behavioural method leveraging the sociality of zebra finches for goal-directed behaviours. Our approach relies on visual social reinforcement, without depriving the animals of food or social contact. Using this task, we found that visual social reinforcement was a strong motivational drive for operant behaviour. Motivation was sensitive to familiarity towards the stimulus animal and higher when engaging with a familiar versus a novel individual. We further show that this tool can be used to assess auditory discrimination learning using either songs or synthetic pure tones as stimuli. As birds gained experience in the task, they developed a strategy to maximize reward acquisition in spite of receiving more punishment, i.e. liberal response bias. Our operant paradigm provides an alternative to tasks using food reinforcement and could be applied to a variety of highly social species, such as rodents and nonhuman primates. • We used a novel social reward-based operant task for zebra finches. • Birds were more motivated to obtain access to familiar over novel conspecifics. • Social motivation reinforced auditory discrimination learning in a Go/No-go task. • Birds with more experience in the Go/No-go task developed liberal response bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quick decision making is a vital factor for a successful pass in soccer games. Many previous studies of decision making in soccer focused on motor execution, but inhibitory processing has remained unclear. This study aimed to clarify the differences in motor execution and inhibitory among Japanese collegiate soccer players with different skill levels. We evaluated the behavioral data and event-related potentials in the high-skilled, low-skilled, and novice groups during the Go/No-go and pass choice reaction tasks. The reaction time (RT) was significantly shorter in the high group than in the novice group, and RT variability was small in the high group. The amplitude of the N2 component was significantly larger in the high group than in the low and novice groups, and the latency of the P3 component was significantly shorter in the high and low groups than in the novice group during the pass choice reaction task. The subtracted No-go N2 amplitude was also significantly larger in the high and low groups than in the novice group, and correlations existed between the RT, RT variability, and the subtracted No-go N2 amplitude during these tasks. These data indicate that soccer players' behavioral responses and inhibition processing decision-making activities are associated with skill levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In one-shot experiments, units are subjected to varying levels of stimulus and their binary response (go/no-go) is recorded. Experimental data is used to estimate the "sensitivity function", which characterizes the probability of a "go" for a given level of stimulus. We review the current GLM approaches to modeling and inference, and identify some deficiencies. To address these, we propose a novel Bayesian approach using an adjustable number of cubic splines, with physically-plausible smoothness, monotonicity, and tail constraints introduced through the prior distribution on the coefficients. Our approach runs "out of the box," and in roughly the same time as the GLM approaches. We illustrate with two contrasting datasets, and show that our more flexible Bayesian approach gives different inferences to the GLM approaches for both the sensitivity function and its inverse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Executive functioning is a cognitive process that coordinates and organizes other mental processes to adapt to the demands of the environment, with the inhibition prepotent responses being a fundamental skill of this process. Inhibition involves interpreting signals and monitoring conflicts, activating the anterior cingulate cortex for greater cognitive control. The attentional control theory suggests that inhibition and attentional control share brain substrates, and their interruption affects the capacity for inhibition and switching. In a task where preponderant responses to certain stimuli must be inhibited, such as the Go/No-Go task, cultural familiarity could influence performance, since exposure to culturalized elements can become preponderant responses. However, this effect has not been fully explored. To explore this phenomenon, an observational study was carried out with 15 normotypical participants subjected to the Go/No-Go task in two versions: the traditional task and a variant with novel stimuli. The correct answers, the reaction time, the commissions, and omissions of both versions were analyzed. The results suggest that there is a large effect size (d = 1.16, p = < 0.001) reaction time differential between the two versions in favor of the traditional version, which responded more quickly. Additionally, the concordance and correspondence measures obtained a low similarity (-0.06 [-0.36 | 0.25]) between the reaction times of the traditional and alternative tasks. It is concluded that the data suggest the influence of a differential effect when using a culturally learned stimulus and one that is not, although this effect is concentrated in response times. It is suggested to pay attention to this factor as an active element of the Go/NoGo task in future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders diagnosed in childhood. Two common features of ADHD are impaired behavioural inhibition and sustained attention. The Go/No-Go experimental paradigm with concurrent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning has previously revealed important neurobiological correlates of ADHD such as the supplementary motor area and the prefrontal cortex. The coordinate-based meta-analysis combined with quantitative techniques, such as activation likelihood estimate (ALE) generation, provides an unbiased and objective method of summarising these data to understand the brain network architecture and connectivity in ADHD children. Go/No-Go task-based fMRI studies involving children and adolescent subjects were selected. Coordinates indicating foci of activation were collected to generate ALEs using threshold values (voxel-level: p < 0.001; cluster-level: p < 0.05). ALEs were matched to one of seven canonical brain networks based on the cortical parcellation scheme derived from the Human Connectome Project. Fourteen studies involving 457 children met the eligibility criteria. No significant convergence of Go/No-Go related brain activation was found for ADHD groups. Three significant ALE clusters were detected for brain activation relating to controls or ADHD < controls. Significant clusters were related to specific areas of the default mode network (DMN). Network-based analysis revealed less extensive DMN, dorsal attention network, and limbic network activation in ADHD children compared to controls. The presence of significant ALE clusters may be due to reduced homogeneity in the selected sample demographic and experimental paradigm. Further investigations regarding hemispheric asymmetry in ADHD subjects would be beneficial.

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a severe psychiatric disorder marked by extreme weight control behaviors and significant impacts on physical and psychosocial health. This study explores the relationship between vitamin D (Vit-D) levels and impulsivity in women with AN. Forty-six cisgender White women participants were assessed upon admission and before discharge from a specialized eating disorder treatment center, with an average duration of 2.5 ± 0.10 months. Methods included self-reported questionnaires and behavioral tasks to measure impulsivity, alongside serum Vit-D levels. Our results showed significant improvements in Vit-D levels and certain impulsivity measures, such as faster reaction times and fewer errors on the go/no-go task, correlating with higher Vit-D levels. However, no significant correlations were found between Vit-D levels and self-reported impulsivity. These findings suggest that adequate Vit-D levels may enhance cognitive functions related to impulse control in AN. Given this study’s limitations, including its exclusive focus on women and small sample size, future research should involve larger, more diverse populations and randomized clinical trials to better understand the causal relationships and therapeutic potential of Vit-D in managing AN-related impulsivity.

Prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE), the leading known cause of childhood developmental disability, has long‐lasting effects extending throughout the lifespan. It is well documented that children prenatally exposed to alcohol have difficulties inhibiting behavior and sustaining attention. Thus, the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART), a Go/No‐go paradigm, is especially well suited to assess the behavioral and neural functioning characteristics of children with PAE. In this study, we utilized neuropsychological assessment, parent/guardian questionnaires, and magnetoencephalography during SART random and fixed orders to assess characteristics of children 8–12 years old prenatally exposed to alcohol compared to typically developing children. Compared to neurotypical control children, children with a Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) diagnosis had significantly decreased performance on neuropsychological measures, had deficiencies in task‐based performance, were rated as having increased Attention‐Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) behaviors and as having lower cognitive functioning by their caretakers, and had decreased peak amplitudes in Broadmann's Area 44 (BA44) during SART. Further, MEG peak amplitude in BA44 was found to be significantly associated with neuropsychological test results, parent/guardian questionnaires, and task‐based performance such that decreased amplitude was associated with poorer performance. In exploratory analyses, we also found significant correlations between total cortical volume and MEG peak amplitude indicating that the reduced amplitude is likely related in part to reduced overall brain volume often reported in children with PAE. These findings show that children 8–12 years old with an FASD diagnosis have decreased amplitudes in BA44 during SART random order, and that these deficits are associated with multiple behavioral measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disgust sensitivity refers to how unpleasant a disgusting experience is to an individual and is involved in the development of many psychiatric conditions. Given its link with food ingestion, there is an interest in understanding how an individual’s susceptibility to disgust relates to dietary habits. One possible mechanism giving rise to this association is through the effects negative emotions have on high-order cognitive processes, but few studies take this model into account. The aim of this study was to characterize general disgust sensitivity in a clinical binge eating disorder (BED) population, and explore whether disgust sensitivity relates to inhibitory control and eating pathology. Following a case-controlled study design, our results show that: (1) disgust sensitivity and its subscales do not differ between BED and healthy controls, (2) higher disgust sensitivity in BED relates to greater behavioural inhibition, (3) inhibitory control reaction times relate to aspects of eating pathology, and (4) inhibitory control does not mediate relationships between disgust sensitivity and BMI among participants with BED. Understanding the role of disgust sensitivity in BED may allow us to understand how negative emotion systems maintain dysregulated eating behaviours with the potential to inform emotion-regulation treatment approaches. Level of evidence: Level III: Evidence obtained from well-designed cohort or case–control analytic studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-synesthetes exhibit a tendency to associate specific shapes with particular colours (i.e., circle-red, triangle-yellow, and square-blue). Here, we used two Go/No-go tasks to examine the congruency priming effect of colour–shape associations on recognition efficiency of colour and shape features. At the beginning of each trial, a target colour or shape word was introduced, followed by a coloured-shape visual stimulus. Participants were required to press a key to a target stimulus ("go" cues), while withholding their responses to a non-target stimulus ("no-go" cues). The targets were presented either visually (visual word, Experiment 1) or auditorily (spoken word, Experiment 2). Results showed a congruency effect of colour–shape associations on recognition efficiency for colour and shape features in both experiments. Response times were shorter in congruent than in incongruent conditions, that a target could be recognised faster when it was presented with the congruent visual features than with incongruent ones, irrespective of the presentation form (visual or auditory). These results suggest that colour–shape associations can be strong to influence visual recognition of colour and shape features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pediatric obesity is a major public health concern. Genetic susceptibility and increased availability of energy-dense food are known risk factors for obesity. However, the extent to which these factors jointly bias behavior and neural circuitry towards increased adiposity in children remains unclear. While undergoing fMRI, 108 children (ages 5-11y) performed a food-specific go/no-go task. Participants were instructed to either respond ("go") or inhibit responding ("no-go") to images of food or toys. Half of the runs depicted high-calorie foods (e.g., pizza) whereas the other half depicted low-calorie foods (e.g., salad). Children were also genotyped for a DNA polymorphism associated with energy intake and obesity (FTO rs9939609) to examine the influence of obesity risk on behavioral and brain responses to food. Participants demonstrated differences in behavioral sensitivity to high- and low-calorie food images depending on task demands. Participants were slower but more accurate at detecting high- (relative to low-) calorie foods when responding to a neutral stimulus (i.e., toys) and worse at detecting toys when responding to high-calorie foods. Inhibition failures were accompanied by salience network activity (anterior insula, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex), which was driven by false alarms to food images. Children at a greater genetic risk for obesity (dose-dependent model of the FTO genotype) demonstrated pronounced brain and behavioral relationships such that genetic risk was associated with heightened sensitivity to high-calorie food images and increased anterior insula activity. These findings suggest that high-calorie foods may be particularly salient to children at risk for developing eating habits that promote obesity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inhibitory control performance may differ greatly as a function of individual differences such as anxiety. Nonetheless, how cognitive control proficiency might be influenced by exposure to various environments and how anxiety traits might impact these effects remain unexplored. A cohort of thirty healthy volunteers participated in the study. Participants performed a Go/No-Go task before exposure to a ‘forest’ and ‘urban’ virtual environment, in a counterbalanced design, before repeating the GNG task. The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) was finally filled-in. Our findings unveiled an initial negative correlation between anxiety trait levels and GNG task performance, consistent with the established literature attributing difficulties in inhibitory functionality to anxiety. Additionally, different environmental exposures reported opposite trends. Exposure to the ‘forest’ environment distinctly improved the GNG performance in relation to anxiety traits, while the ‘urban’ setting demonstrated adverse effects on task performance. These results underscore the intricate relationship among cognitive control, environmental exposure, and trait anxiety. In particular, our findings highlight the potential of natural settings, such as forests, to mitigate the impact of anxiety on inhibition. This might have implications for interventions aimed at improving cognitive control.

Early childhood is characterized by robust developmental changes in cognitive control. However, our understanding of intra-individual change in neural indices of cognitive control during this period remains limited. Here, we examined developmental changes in event-related potential (ERP) indices of cognitive control from preschool through first grade, in a large and diverse sample of children (N = 257). We recorded ERPs during a visual Go/No-Go task. N2 and P3b mean amplitudes were extracted from the observed waveforms (Go and No-Go) and the difference wave (No-Go minus Go, or ∆). Latent growth curve modeling revealed that while N2 Go and No-Go amplitudes showed no linear change, P3b Go and No-Go amplitudes displayed linear decreases in magnitude (became less positive) over time. ∆N2 amplitude demonstrated a linear increase in magnitude (became more negative) over time whereas ∆P3b amplitude was more positive in kindergarten compared to preschool. Younger age in preschool predicted greater rates of change in ∆N2 amplitude, and higher maternal education predicted larger initial P3b Go and No-Go amplitudes in preschool. Our findings suggest that observed waveforms and difference waves are not interchangeable for indexing neurodevelopment, and the developmental trajectories of different ERP indices of cognitive control are component-specific in early childhood.

Introduction: In patients with severe auditory impairment, partial hearing restoration can be achieved by sensory prostheses for the electrical stimulation of the central nervous system. However, these state-of-the-art approaches suffer from limited spectral resolution: electrical field spread depends on the impedance of the surrounding medium, impeding spatially focused electrical stimulation in neural tissue. To overcome these limitations, optogenetic activation could be applied in such prostheses to achieve enhanced resolution through precise and differential stimulation of nearby neuronal ensembles. Previous experiments have provided a first proof for behavioral detectability of optogenetic activation in the rodent auditory system, but little is known about the generation of complex and behaviorally relevant sensory patterns involving differential activation. Methods: In this study, we developed and behaviorally tested an optogenetic implant to excite two spatially separated points along the tonotopy of the murine inferior colliculus (ICc). Results: Using a reward based operant Go/No-Go paradigm, we show that differential optogenetic activation of a sub-cortical sensory pathway is possible and efficient. We demonstrate how animals which were previously trained in a frequency discrimination paradigm (a) rapidly respond to either sound or optogenetic stimulation, (b) generally detect optogenetic stimulation of two different neuronal ensembles, and (c) discriminate between them. Discussion: Our results demonstrate that optogenetic excitatory stimulation at different points of the ICc tonotopy elicits a stable response behavior over time periods of several months. With this study, we provide the first proof of principle for sub-cortical differential stimulation of sensory systems using complex artificial cues in freely moving animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IntroductionThis study investigates the efficacy of sensory integration training (SIT) in enhancing balance and executive functions in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), with the aim of highlighting its potential for organizing and processing sensory information in the brain.MethodsUtilizing Footscan for biomechanical evidence and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) for neural activation, we engaged two participant groups: a control group (n = 9) and an experimental group (n = 9). Assessments involved the Sharpened Romberg Test (SRT) for balance under varied visual conditions and the Go/No-Go task for executive function.ResultsThe SIT intervention significantly improved balance function, particularly in Visual Deprivation (VD) scenarios. Neurophysiological data revealed heightened activation in the right Inferior Frontal Gyrus (R-IFG) and right Middle Frontal Gyrus (R-MFG), suggesting enhanced executive function. The potential of R-IFG/MFG activation as a reliable biomarker for assessing executive function in ASD was identified.DiscussionThe study provides empirical evidence supporting SIT’s effectiveness in enhancing balance and executive functions in children with ASD. The therapy not only improves sensory processing and motor skills but also appears to compensate for sensory deficits, particularly in vision, vestibular perception, and proprioception. Enhanced neural activation in specific PFC regions underscores SIT’s role in improving cognitive aspects, including inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility. The multidisciplinary approach adopted for this research highlights the intricate interplay between sensory-motor functions and cognitive control in ASD, paving the way for integrated therapeutic strategies. Despite these advancements, the mechanisms through which SIT exerts these multifaceted effects require further exploration.

Objective: Researchers in animal cognition, psychophysics, and experimental psychology need to randomise the presentation order of trials in experimental sessions. In many paradigms, for each trial, one of two responses can be correct, and the trials need to be ordered such that the participant's responses are a fair assessment of their performance. Specifically, in some cases, especially for low numbers of trials, randomised trial orders need to be excluded if they contain simple patterns which a participant could accidentally match and so succeed at the task without learning. Results: We present and distribute a simple Python software package and tool to produce pseudorandom sequences following the Gellermann series. This series has been proposed to pre-empt simple heuristics and avoid inflated performance rates via false positive responses. Our tool allows users to choose the sequence length and outputs a.csv file with newly and randomly generated sequences. This allows behavioural researchers to produce, in a few seconds, a pseudorandom sequence for their specific experiment. PyGellermann is available at https://github.com/YannickJadoul/PyGellermann. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Neurocognitive testing may advance the goal of predicting near-term suicide risk. The current study examined whether performance on a Go/No-go (GNG) task, and computational modeling to extract latent cognitive variables, could enhance prediction of suicide attempts within next 90 days, among individuals at high-risk for suicide. Method: 136 Veterans at high-risk for suicide previously completed a computer-based GNG task requiring rapid responding (Go) to target stimuli, while withholding responses (No-go) to infrequent foil stimuli; behavioral variables included false alarms to foils (failure to inhibit) and missed responses to targets. We conducted a secondary analysis of these data, with outcomes defined as actual suicide attempt (ASA), other suicide-related event (OtherSE) such as interrupted/aborted attempt or preparatory behavior, or neither (noSE), within 90-days after GNG testing, to examine whether GNG variables could improve ASA prediction over standard clinical variables. A computational model (linear ballistic accumulator, LBA) was also applied, to elucidate cognitive mechanisms underlying group differences. Results: On GNG, increased miss rate selectively predicted ASA, while increased false alarm rate predicted OtherSE (without ASA) within the 90-day follow-up window. In LBA modeling, ASA (but not OtherSE) was associated with decreases in decisional efficiency to targets, suggesting differences in the evidence accumulation process were specifically associated with upcoming ASA. Conclusions: These findings suggest that GNG may improve prediction of near-term suicide risk, with distinct behavioral patterns in those who will attempt suicide within the next 90 days. Computational modeling suggests qualitative differences in cognition in individuals at near-term risk of suicide attempt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exposure to natural green environments, whether through visual media or in person, can bring numerous benefits to physical and mental health. Given the restorative effects that natural forest environments have on the human mind, it is plausible to assume that these effects can also extend to cognitive processes, such as cognitive control, which are fundamental to higher-level cognitive function. In this study, we investigated whether viewing videos of urban or forest environments would have an impact on inhibitory control and attention in people with or without a past COVID-19 infection. To investigate the impact of virtual natural and urban videos on cognitive performance, 45 participants were recruited, and the exposure to forest vs. urban videos was assessed on a Go/No-Go task and an Attentional Network Test. The data showed that in both groups, exposure to the forest videos improved the inhibitory component. The results are discussed in the context of the well-established evidence of the beneficial effects of green environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quick decision making is a vital factor for a successful pass in soccer games. Many previous studies of decision making in soccer focused on motor execution, but inhibitory processing has remained unclear. This study aimed to clarify the differences in motor execution and inhibitory among Japanese collegiate soccer players with different skill levels. We evaluated the behavioral data and event-related potentials in the high-skilled, low-skilled, and novice groups during the Go/No-go and pass choice reaction tasks. The reaction time (RT) was significantly shorter in the high group than in the novice group, and RT variability was small in the high group. The amplitude of the N2 component was significantly larger in the high group than in the low and novice groups, and the latency of the P3 component was significantly shorter in the high and low groups than in the novice group during the pass choice reaction task. The subtracted No-go N2 amplitude was also significantly larger in the high and low groups than in the novice group, and correlations existed between the RT, RT variability, and the subtracted No-go N2 amplitude during these tasks. These data indicate that soccer players’ behavioral responses and inhibition processing decision-making activities are associated with skill levels.

IntroductionIn patients with severe auditory impairment, partial hearing restoration can be achieved by sensory prostheses for the electrical stimulation of the central nervous system. However, these state-of-the-art approaches suffer from limited spectral resolution: electrical field spread depends on the impedance of the surrounding medium, impeding spatially focused electrical stimulation in neural tissue. To overcome these limitations, optogenetic activation could be applied in such prostheses to achieve enhanced resolution through precise and differential stimulation of nearby neuronal ensembles. Previous experiments have provided a first proof for behavioral detectability of optogenetic activation in the rodent auditory system, but little is known about the generation of complex and behaviorally relevant sensory patterns involving differential activation.MethodsIn this study, we developed and behaviorally tested an optogenetic implant to excite two spatially separated points along the tonotopy of the murine inferior colliculus (ICc).ResultsUsing a reward based operant Go/No-Go paradigm, we show that differential optogenetic activation of a sub-cortical sensory pathway is possible and efficient. We demonstrate how animals which were previously trained in a frequency discrimination paradigm (a) rapidly respond to either sound or optogenetic stimulation, (b) generally detect optogenetic stimulation of two different neuronal ensembles, and (c) discriminate between them.DiscussionOur results demonstrate that optogenetic excitatory stimulation at different points of the ICc tonotopy elicits a stable response behavior over time periods of several months. With this study, we provide the first proof of principle for sub-cortical differential stimulation of sensory systems using complex artificial cues in freely moving animals.

The goal of the current study was to examine differences in neurocognitive processes across groups marked by binge drinking and depression to identify patterns of cognitive and affective processing impairments. Undergraduate students (N = 104; 64% female) were recruited based on self-reported symptoms of depression and alcohol use. They completed an emotional Go/No-Go task while undergoing EEG. Mean amplitudes for N2 and P3 components were examined with 2 (Depressed/Non-depressed) X 2 (Binge/Non-binge drinkers) X 4 (Happy/Sad/Angry/Calm) X 3 (Left/Middle/Right) X 2 (Go/No-Go) repeated measures ANOVAs. There were significant Trial Type X Valence X Depression X Binge Drinking interactions for N2 (F (3, 80) = 6.62, p <.01) and P3 (F (3, 80) = 4.65, p <.01) components. There was a significant Valence X Depression X Binge Drinking interaction for response bias (F (3, 65) = 3.11, p <.05). The source of our sample may be a limitation, as all participants were university students, potentially making the results less generalizable. Further, we cannot be certain that social desirability did not interfere with honest reporting of alcohol use in this population. Differences in early inhibitory control were observed across emotions based on trial type among depressed non-binge drinkers, and these differences were attenuated in the presence of binge drinking. Further, the effects of depression on later inhibitory control were specific to non-binge drinkers. Results help to clarify the nature of underlying patterns of neurocognitive and affective risk processes that could be targeted by prevention and intervention programs. • In early stages of processing, depressed non-binge drinkers required greater attentional engagements, as evidence by enhanced N2 amplitudes on Go trials. • In early stages of processing, the effects of depression were attenuated among binge drinkers, suggesting that emerging adults may use alcohol to regulate affect. • During later stages of processing, attenuated P3 amplitudes were observed in the context of depressive symptoms and absence of binge drinking, suggesting depression-related impairments in the processing of emotional stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research on boredom suggest it function as animportant self-regulatory signal, indicating that the currentstate of the environment carries opportunity-costs andtherefore driving the need to explore alternative activities. Traitboredom proneness is associated with negative consequencesincluding increased risk-taking and impulsivity. Thesefindings often rely on self-reports and not much is known aboutthe role of state and trait boredom in controlled laboratorytasks, or their neural correlates. Sixty-two participantscompleted the Balloon Analogue Risk Task and a go/no-gotask while electrical brain activity was recorded using EEG.Results showed that state boredom leads to impulsivity andpoor performance monitoring, as evident by behavioral,subjective and ERP metrics. Trait boredom was associatedwith increased risk-taking, and modulated the correlationbetween errors and state boredom: high boredom pronenessincreased the sensitivity of trait boredom to errors. Overall,these findings emphasize the involvement of executivefunctions in the interaction between state and trait boredom.

Background: Internet addiction, a serious psychological disorder, has rapidly increased among students and caused substantial interpersonal impairments. On the other hand, some evidence has indicated that impulsivity is associated with addictive behaviors. Objectives: There are a few studies concerning the relationship between internet addiction and impulsivity in Iranian students. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the relationship between impulsivity and internet addiction in the medical students of Golestan University of Medical Sciences, Golestan, Iran, within 2020-2021. Methods: In a cross-sectional study, 260 medical students at Golestan University of Medical Sciences in 2021 completed demographic, Barratt Impulsiveness Scale, and Young questionnaires and participated in a Go/No-Go computer test. Based on Young test scores, the students were divided into three groups of normal users, at-risk users, and users requiring treatment and compared regarding impulsivity and inhibition ability. Data was analyzed using SPSS v 23. Results: The mean age of the participants was 24.16 years. The results showed a significant correlation between impulsivity and internet addiction (p = 0.001), which was established in all contextual indicators. A significant correlation was also shown between impulsivity and internet addiction (r = 0.602 and p = 0.001), both in male and female student. However, restraint index was correlated with internet addiction only in females (r = 0.187 and p = 0.033). Conclusion: Based on these findings, impulsivity increases alongside the rising of the internet addiction severity and does not influence by gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The overvaluation of reward-associated stimuli such as energy-dense foods can drive compulsive eating behaviours, including overeating. Previous research has shown that training individuals to inhibit their responses towards appetitive stimuli can lead to their devaluation, providing a potential avenue for behaviour change. Over two preregistered experiments, we investigated whether training participants to inhibit their responses to specific foods would be effective in reducing their evaluations when these were assessed using both explicit and implicit measures. Participants completed an online session of go/no-go training with energy-dense foods that were consistently associated with either responding (go) or inhibiting a response (no-go). An 'explicit' devaluation effect was expected as a reduction in self-reported liking from pre-to post-training for no-go items compared to both go items and foods that were not presented during training (untrained items). An 'implicit' devaluation effect was then measured using the affective priming paradigm, by comparing differences in reaction times for congruent and incongruent trials (i.e., priming effects) between food primes. Experiment 1 revealed conclusive evidence for small-to-medium devaluation effects both in terms of explicit ratings and priming effects. We also observed that the priming effect for no-go items was close to zero. Experiment 2 successfully replicated most of the preregistered and exploratory outcomes from Experiment 1 except for the priming effect for untrained items. Potential explanations for this discrepancy are discussed but overall, these findings provide further support for a devaluation effect of response inhibition training. To our knowledge, our study provides the first evidence that traininginduced devaluation can potentially be captured by affective priming measures, but more research is needed to further assess their sensitivity before they can be used to elucidate the mechanisms of action underlying devaluation effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The overvaluation of reward-associated stimuli such as energy-dense foods can drive compulsive eating behaviours, including overeating. Previous research has shown that training individuals to inhibit their responses towards appetitive stimuli can lead to their devaluation, providing a potential avenue for behaviour change. Over two preregistered experiments, we investigated whether training participants to inhibit their responses to specific foods would be effective in reducing their evaluations when these were assessed using both explicit and implicit measures. Participants completed an online session of go/no-go training with energy-dense foods that were consistently associated with either responding (go) or inhibiting a response (no-go). An ‘explicit’ devaluation effect was expected as a reduction in self-reported liking from pre-to post-training for no-go items compared to both go items and foods that were not presented during training (untrained items). An ‘implicit’ devaluation effect was then measured using the affective priming paradigm, by comparing differences in reaction times for congruent and incongruent trials (i.e., priming effects) between food primes. Experiment 1 revealed conclusive evidence for small-to-medium devaluation effects both in terms of explicit ratings and priming effects. We also observed that the priming effect for no-go items was close to zero. Experiment 2 successfully replicated most of the preregistered and exploratory outcomes from Experiment 1 except for the priming effect for untrained items. Potential explanations for this discrepancy are discussed but overall, these findings provide further support for a devaluation effect of response inhibition training. To our knowledge, our study provides the first evidence that training-induced devaluation can potentially be captured by affective priming measures, but more research is needed to further assess their sensitivity before they can be used to elucidate the mechanisms of action underlying devaluation effects.

BackgroundInternet addiction, a serious psychological disorder, has rapidly increased among students and caused substantial interpersonal impairments. On the other hand, some evidence has indicated that impulsivity is associated with addictive behaviors.ObjectivesThere are a few studies concerning the relationship between internet addiction and impulsivity in Iranian students. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the relationship between impulsivity and internet addiction in the medical students of Golestan University of Medical Sciences, Golestan, Iran, within 2020–2021.MethodsIn a cross-sectional study, 260 medical students at Golestan University of Medical Sciences in 2021 completed demographic, Barratt Impulsiveness Scale, and Young questionnaires and participated in a Go/No-Go computer test. Based on Young test scores, the students were divided into three groups of normal users, at-risk users, and users requiring treatment and compared regarding impulsivity and inhibition ability. Data was analyzed using SPSS v 23.ResultsThe mean age of the participants was 24.16 years. The results showed a significant correlation between impulsivity and internet addiction (p = 0.001), which was established in all contextual indicators. A significant correlation was also shown between impulsivity and internet addiction (r = 0.602 and p = 0.001), both in male and female student. However, restraint index was correlated with internet addiction only in females (r = 0.187 and p = 0.033).ConclusionBased on these findings, impulsivity increases alongside the rising of the internet addiction severity and does not influence by gender.

(1) Objective: The aim of this study was to examine the effect of high altitude on inhibitory control processes that underlie sustained attention in the neural correlates of EEG data, and explore whether the EEG data reflecting inhibitory control contain valuable information to classify high-altitude chronic hypoxia and plain controls. (2) Methods: 35 chronic high-altitude hypoxic adults and 32 matched controls were recruited. They were required to perform the go/no-go sustained attention task (GSAT) using event-related potentials. Three machine learning algorithms, namely a support vector machine (SVM), logistic regression (LR), and a decision tree (DT), were trained based on the related ERP components and neural oscillations to build a dichotomous classification model. (3) Results: Behaviorally, we found that the high altitude (HA) group had lower omission error rates during all observation periods than the low altitude (LA) group. Meanwhile, the ERP results showed that the HA participants had significantly shorter latency than the LAs for sustained potential (SP), indicating vigilance to response-related conflict. Meanwhile, event-related spectral perturbation (ERSP) analysis suggested that lowlander immigrants exposed to high altitudes may have compensatory activated prefrontal cortexes (PFC), as reflected by slow alpha, beta, and theta frequency-band neural oscillations. Finally, the machine learning results showed that the SVM achieved the optimal classification F1 score in the later stage of sustained attention, with an F1 score of 0.93, accuracy of 92.54%, sensitivity of 91.43%, specificity of 93.75%, and area under ROC curve (AUC) of 0.97. The results proved that SVM classification algorithms could be applied to identify chronic high-altitude hypoxia. (4) Conclusions: Compared with other methods, the SVM leads to a good overall performance that increases with the time spent on task, illustrating that the ERPs and neural oscillations may provide neuroelectrophysiological markers for identifying chronic plateau hypoxia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deficits in inhibitory control are common with advancing age and may underlie declines in other complex cognitive functions. The inhibitory P300 event-related potential (ERP) generally decreases in amplitude with age, reflecting deficits in inhibitory performance evaluation and adaptation, with possible generators including precentral and inferior frontal gyri and midcingulate and parietal cortex. Exposure to early-life stress (ELS) is also associated with deficits in inhibitory control, smaller P300 amplitudes, and dysfunction in regions associated with P300 generation. Although biopsychosocial effects of ELS are evident in older adulthood, the influence of ELS on neural processes in later life is unknown. In the current study, 13 young adults and 21 healthy older adults completed a high-accuracy go/no-go task and the Juvenile Victimization Questionnaire (JVQ), an indicator of ELS. Regression analyses revealed significant central-parietal models, with smaller P300 amplitudes predicted by both older age and greater exposure to ELS. Age group*ELS interactions moderated P300 prediction at central and centro-parietal electrodes, such that older age predicted smaller P300 amplitudes only in those with lower to moderate ELS. Amplitudes did not significantly differ by age in those with higher ELS. Post-hoc within-age group correlations showed that greater ELS was associated with smaller P300 amplitudes in young adults. However, greater ELS was modestly associated with larger central amplitudes in older adults, potentially suggestive of anterior age-related compensatory recruitment to maintain high task performance. These findings suggest long-lasting neural implications of ELS that interact with normative neuro-cognitive aging processes, such that ELS may be an important risk factor for age-related cognitive decline. • Smaller P300 amplitudes were predicted by both older age and greater exposure to ELS in central-parietal regions. • Age*ELS moderations clarified that older age predicted smaller P300 amplitudes only in those with lower to moderate ELS. • Greater ELS was associated with smaller P300 amplitudes in young adults but larger central amplitudes in older adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exposure to natural green environments, whether through visual media or in person, can bring numerous benefits to physical and mental health. Given the restorative effects that natural forest environments have on the human mind, it is plausible to assume that these effects can also extend to cognitive processes, such as cognitive control, which are fundamental to higher-level cognitive function. In this study, we investigated whether viewing videos of urban or forest environments would have an impact on inhibitory control and attention in people with or without a past COVID-19 infection. To investigate the impact of virtual natural and urban videos on cognitive performance, 45 participants were recruited, and the exposure to forest vs. urban videos was assessed on a Go/No-Go task and an Attentional Network Test. The data showed that in both groups, exposure to the forest videos improved the inhibitory component. The results are discussed in the context of the well-established evidence of the beneficial effects of green environments.

The ability to plan, inhibit, and execute motor movements areall necessary for achieving goal-directed behavior. Theseprocesses are closely related to memory, as perceptual inputand memory of that input often recruit motor movements.Unknown, however, is how the engagement of perception-action processes impact the memory of objects. One suchinteraction suggests that participants have worse memory recallfor stimuli which elicit inhibition of a motor response thanstimuli which afford the execution of a motor response (Chiu& Egner, 2015). This effect has been explained throughcompetition for common neural resources: allocation ofresources toward response inhibition reduces the amount ofresources available for memory. Alternatively, this effect couldbe driven at the level of perception-action coupling: engagingand pairing the motor system with visual perception enhancesthe memory of stimuli which elicited the motor preparation orresponse. To test these hypotheses, we first replicated Chiu andEgner (2015). In Experiment 2, we included neutral stimuli thatdid not necessitate motor preparation processes. Memory wasenhanced for stimuli presented in conjunction with motorengagement, providing evidence for an account of memory thatis facilitated when coupled with the motor system.

Modulation of neural circuits is essential for flexible sensory perception and decisionmaking in a changing environment. Cholinergic and GABAergic projections to the olfactory system from the horizontal limb of the diagonal band of Broca (HDB) in the basal forebrain are crucial for odor detection and olfactory learning. Although studies have demonstrated that HDB neurons respond during olfactory learning, how cholinergic and GABAergic neurons differ in their response dynamics and roles in olfactory learning remains unclear. In this study, we examined the response profiles of these two subpopulations of neurons during passive odor exposure and associative olfactory learning. We show that the excitatory responses in both cholinergic and GABAergic neurons tended to habituate during repeated passive odor exposure. However, while these habituated responses were also observed in GABAergic neurons during a go-go task, there was no such habituation in cholinergic neurons. Moreover, the responses to S+ and S-trials diverged in cholinergic neurons once mice learned a go/no-go task. Furthermore, the chemogenetic inactivation of cholinergic neurons in the HDB impaired odor discrimination. Together, these findings suggest that cholinergic neurons in the HDB reflect attention to positive reinforcement and may regulate odor discrimination via top-down inputs to the olfactory system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Acute sleep deprivation (ASD) can effect mood, attention, memory, alertness and metabolism. Especially, it is often accompanied by cognitive impairment of the brain. Acupuncture is safe and effective for improving cognitive function, but its underlying mechanism is not fully understood. In this study, an event-related potential (ERP) technique will be employed to measure the behavioral, cognitive, and physiological changes produced by electroacupuncture intervention after ASD. Methods: We will recruit 60 healthy subjects. The participants will be randomly divided into a treatment group, a control group, a sham electroacupuncture group and a blank group, at a 1:1:1:1 ratio. The primary outcome will be determined by the change from baseline to 36 h in the MoCA score. The secondary results include the amplitude and latency of ERP N2 and P3, Go-hit rates, Go-RTs, No-Go-FA rates, the WCST, the Digit Span Subtest of the WAIS, the ESS score and FS-14. The 15 healthy subjects will not receive acupuncture treatment and ASD, but will receive EEG records and cognition functions test at the beginning and end of the experiment. Electroacupuncture intervention will be performed for 30 min once every 12 h, a total of three times. ERP measurements and other tests will be performed after baseline and ASD, and the statistician and outcome evaluator will be blinded to treatment allocation. Discussion: This study is expected to investigate the effectiveness of electroacupuncture in improving cognition for ASD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: It is well known that, owing to associative processing, olfactory cues can impact memory, emotion and behaviour. Research also points to a link between the smells of particular substances and craving. Yet, to date, little research has investigated how smell may impact other cognitive processes that are known to drive alcohol consumption. Aim: To assess how exposure to alcohol-related (vodka) relative to neutral (citrus) olfactory cues impacts inhibitory control and attentional bias. Method: Participants took part in a go/no-go (Study 1) and Stroop task (Study 2) while wearing masks that were pre-treated with vodka or citrus oil of equivalent intensity. Study 1 results: Response error rates were higher in participants in the alcohol-related (versus neutral) olfactory condition, with no interaction between olfactory and visual cue. Study 2 results: Responses to alcohol-related versus neutral words were similar, while performance appeared significantly impaired among participants wearing alcohol (relative to citrus) infused masks. Conclusion The smell of alcohol may impair signal detection performance on the go/no-go and Stroop task. As inhibitory control and attentional processes are known to be associated with decisions to drink or exercise restraint, these results may have implications for our understanding of alcohol consumption and for tailoring interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proof-of-concept (PoC) trials enable sponsors decide whether to continue or discontinue a compound's development based on preliminary evidence of safety and efficacy. Many accounts exist on using quantitative approaches for this decision. Still, these accounts are devoid of quantitative decisions under unequal covariances and post-treatment variances for continuous endpoints. Filling this void is important because randomization to treatment groups only guarantees equal variances before treatment initiation. In this article, I show how unequal covariances and post-treatment variances affect the consider zone when using a three-outcome frequentist decision framework. Results herein suggest that the consider zone decreases with increase in correlation between baseline and post-baseline measurements for any sample size. Compared to decrease in consider zone under equal covariances and post-treatment variances, decrease in consider zone was greater under unequal covariances and post-treatment variances. The results suggest that ignoring a baseline covariate correlated with an outcome robs the study team of an opportunity to effectively minimize uncertain decision in PoC trial scoped to support quantitative decisions. Used for illustration is design of a PoC trial in kidney disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The benefit of food-specific inhibition training on modulating food valuation and eating behaviors has been established, but generalization to untrained foods is seldomly examined. This study investigated whether stimulus variability and practice order, found to effect generalization in motor learning, can improve generalization following food-specific inhibition training. Ninety-three young adults practiced the Go/No-Go task online in three training conditions: 1) Constant (N = 30): inhibition practiced on one food stimulus; 2) Variable-Blocked (N = 32): inhibition practiced on 6 food stimuli, each in a separate block; and 3) Variable-Random (N = 31): inhibition practiced on 6 food stimuli in random order. Consistent with our hypothesis, the Variable-Random group showed better generalization of inhibition to untrained foods than the Constant and the Variable-Blocked groups immediately after training, demonstrating the benefit of stimulus variability and random practice order. This effect was not present 24 h after training. The Variable-Random group also showed decreased desire to eat untrained foods, exhibiting generalization of food devaluation. However, this effect was only present 24 h after training. The Constant group showed increased desire to eat untrained foods immediately and 24 h after training. The Variable-Blocked group did not differ from either group in the desire to eat to untrained foods, suggesting that random order is important for exposing the benefit of variability. The findings illustrate that presenting various training items in random order can improve generalization of food-specific inhibition training. However, inconsistencies found in the timing of generalization effects and modest effect sizes warrant additional investigation into generalization principles of food-specific inhibition training., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Executing go/no-go or approach/avoidance responses toward a stimulus can change its evaluation. To explain these effects, some theoretical accounts propose that executing these responses inherently triggers affective reactions (i.e., action execution), while others posit that the evaluative influences originate from interpreting these responses as valenced actions (i.e., action interpretation). To test the role of action execution and action interpretation in these evaluative effects, we developed a novel training task that combined both go/no-go and approach/avoidance actions orthogonally. Participants either responded or did not respond (i.e., go/no-go) to control a shopping cart on screen, and as a result, either collected or did not collect (i.e., approach/avoidance) certain food items. When the task instructions referred to the go/no-go actions (Experiment 1, N = 148), we observed an effect of these actions. Participants evaluated no-go items less positively than both go and untrained items. No effect of approach/avoidance actions was observed. Contrarily, when the task instructions referred to the approach/avoidance actions (Experiment 2, N = 158), we observed an approach/avoidance effect. Participants evaluated approached items more positively and avoided items less positively than untrained items. No effect of go/no-go actions was observed. This suggests that action interpretation determined whether go/no-go or approach/avoidance actions influenced stimulus evaluation, when the same motor responses were made. Further examination of the role of action interpretation can inform theories of how actions influence stimulus evaluation, and facilitate the use of these interventions in applied settings., Competing Interests: Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interests., (© 2024 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.)

Objective: Binge eating appears to be associated with impulsivity, especially in response to negative affect (i.e., negative urgency). However, negative urgency is typically assessed via self-report, which captures only some aspects of urgency and may be subject to bias. Few studies have examined impulsivity following experimental manipulations of affect in binge-eating samples., Method: In the present study, individuals who engage in regular binge eating completed a behavioural impulsivity (go/no-go) task with high- and low-calorie food stimuli, once following negative affect induction and once following neutral affect induction., Results: Greater behavioural impulsivity to high-calorie food cues while in a negative (and not a neutral) affective state was associated with more frequent binge-eating behaviour. Further, this behavioural measure of negative urgency uniquely accounted for variance in binge-eating frequency when controlling for self-reported negative urgency, suggesting that behavioural measures may be a useful complement to self-report measures., Discussion: These findings provide novel and compelling evidence for the relationship between negative urgency and binge eating, highlighting negative urgency as a potentially important target for intervention., (© 2024 Eating Disorders Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

The present study aimed to investigate the blocking of stimulus control in three children with autism. We used a go/no-go procedure in a standard blocking paradigm. In Phase 1, we established one of two sounds or colored squares as a discriminative stimulus for touching a tablet screen. In Phase 2, a colored square was added to the sound or a sound was added to the colored square in a stimulus compound. The discrimination training continued as in Phase 1. We subsequently tested discriminative control by each of the single stimuli separately and by the compounds. Finally, after testing with no programmed consequences, we reestablished the original discrimination and replicated the test of stimulus control. The results support previous experiments by demonstrating that the establishment of discriminative control by a second stimulus by adding it to a previously established discriminative stimulus in a compound was blocked by the earlier discrimination training in all three participants. We discuss procedural details that may be critical to avoid the blocking of stimulus control in the applied field, particularly with respect to the acquisition of skills that involve multiple stimuli, such as joint attention, social referencing, and bidirectional naming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a severe psychiatric condition characterized by selective cognitive dysfunctions. In this regard, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies showed, both at resting state and during tasks, alterations in the brain functional networks involved in cognitive processes in MDD patients compared to controls. Among those, it seems that the attention network may have a role in the disease pathophysiology. Therefore, in this review we aim at summarizing the current fMRI evidence investigating sustained attention in MDD patients.Methods: We conducted a search on PubMed on case-control studies on MDD employing fMRI acquisitions during Go/No-Go and continuous performance tasks. A total of 12 studies have been included in the review.Results: Overall, the majority of fMRI studies reported quantitative alterations in the response to attentive tasks in selective brain regions, including the prefrontal cortex, the cingulate cortex, the temporal and parietal lobes, the insula and the precuneus, which are key nodes of the attention, the executive, and the default mode networks.Limitations: The heterogeneity in the study designs, fMRI acquisition techniques and processing methods have limited the generalizability of the results.Conclusions: The results from the included studies showed the presence of alterations in the activation patterns of regions involved in sustained attention in MDD, which are in line with current evidence and seemed to explain some of the key symptoms of depression. However, given the paucity and heterogeneity of studies available, it may be worthwhile to continue investigating the attentional domain in MDD with ad-hoc study designs to retrieve more robust evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) may occur due to several forms of neurodegenerative diseases and non-degenerative conditions and is associated with cognitive impairment that does not affect everyday activities. For a timely diagnosis of MCI to prevent progression to dementia, a screening tool of fast, low-cost and easy access is needed. Recent research on eye movement hints it a potential application for the MCI screening. However, the precise extent of cognitive function decline and eye-movement control alterations in patients with MCI is still unclear. Objective: This study examined executive control deficits and saccade behavioral changes in patients with MCI using comprehensive neuropsychological assessment and interleaved saccade paradigms. Methods: Patients with MCI (n = 79) and age-matched cognitively healthy controls (HC) (n = 170) completed four saccadic eye-movement paradigms: prosaccade (PS)/antisaccade (AS), Go/No-go, and a battery of neuropsychological tests. Results: The findings revealed significantly longer latency in patients with MCI than in HC during the PS task. Additionally, patients with MCI had a lower proportion of correct responses and a marked increase in inhibition errors for both PS/AS and Go/No-go tasks. Furthermore, when patients with MCI made errors, they failed to self-correct many of these inhibition errors. In addition to the increase in inhibition errors and uncorrected inhibition errors, patients with MCI demonstrated a trend toward increased correction latencies. We also showed a relationship between neuropsychological scores and correct and error saccade responses. Conclusion: Our results demonstrate that, similar to patients with Alzheimer's dementia (AD), patients with MCI generate a high proportion of erroneous saccades toward the prepotent target and fail to self-correct many of these errors, which is consistent with an impairment of inhibitory control and error monitoring. Significance: The interleaved PS/AS and Go/No-go paradigms are sensitive and objective at detecting subtle cognitive deficits and saccade changes in MCI, indicating that these saccadic eye movement paradigms have clinical potential as a screening tool for MCI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BackgroundMild cognitive impairment (MCI) may occur due to several forms of neurodegenerative diseases and non-degenerative conditions and is associated with cognitive impairment that does not affect everyday activities. For a timely diagnosis of MCI to prevent progression to dementia, a screening tool of fast, low-cost and easy access is needed. Recent research on eye movement hints it a potential application for the MCI screening. However, the precise extent of cognitive function decline and eye-movement control alterations in patients with MCI is still unclear.ObjectiveThis study examined executive control deficits and saccade behavioral changes in patients with MCI using comprehensive neuropsychological assessment and interleaved saccade paradigms.MethodsPatients with MCI (n = 79) and age-matched cognitively healthy controls (HC) (n = 170) completed four saccadic eye-movement paradigms: prosaccade (PS)/antisaccade (AS), Go/No-go, and a battery of neuropsychological tests.ResultsThe findings revealed significantly longer latency in patients with MCI than in HC during the PS task. Additionally, patients with MCI had a lower proportion of correct responses and a marked increase in inhibition errors for both PS/AS and Go/No-go tasks. Furthermore, when patients with MCI made errors, they failed to self-correct many of these inhibition errors. In addition to the increase in inhibition errors and uncorrected inhibition errors, patients with MCI demonstrated a trend toward increased correction latencies. We also showed a relationship between neuropsychological scores and correct and error saccade responses.ConclusionOur results demonstrate that, similar to patients with Alzheimer’s dementia (AD), patients with MCI generate a high proportion of erroneous saccades toward the prepotent target and fail to self-correct many of these errors, which is consistent with an impairment of inhibitory control and error monitoring.SignificanceThe interleaved PS/AS and Go/No-go paradigms are sensitive and objective at detecting subtle cognitive deficits and saccade changes in MCI, indicating that these saccadic eye movement paradigms have clinical potential as a screening tool for MCI.

Response inhibition refers to the ability to suppress inappropriate actions that interfere with goal-driven behavior. The inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) is known to be associated with inhibition of a motor response by assuming executive control over motor cortex outputs. This study aimed to evaluate the pediatric development of response inhibition through subdural electrocorticography (ECoG) recording. Subdural ECoG recorded neural activities simultaneously during a Go/No-Go task, which was optimized for children. Different frequency power [theta: 4–8 Hz; beta: 12–40 Hz; high-gamma (HG): 70–200 Hz] was estimated within the IFG and motor cortex. Age-related analysis was computed by each bandpass power ratio between Go and No-Go conditions, and phase-amplitude coupling (PAC) over IFG by using the modulating index metric in two conditions. For all the eight pediatric patients, HG power was more activated in No-Go trials than in Go trials, in either right- or left-side IFG when available. In the IFG region, the power over theta and HG in No-Go conditions was higher than those in Go conditions, with significance over the right side (p < 0.05). The age-related lateralization from both sides to the right side was observed from the ratio of HG power and PAC value between the No-Go and Go trials. In the pediatric population, the role of motor inhibition was observed in both IFG, with age-related lateralization to the right side, which was proved in the previous functional magnetic resonance imaging studies. In this study, the evidence correlation of age and response inhibition was observed directly by the evidence of cortical recordings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The serotonin (5-HT) system, particularly the 5-HT2C receptor, has consistently been implicated in behavioural control. However, while some studies have focused on the role 5-HT2C receptors play in regulating motivation to work for reward, others have highlighted its importance in response restraint. To date, it is unclear how 5-HT transmission at this receptor regulates the balance of response invigoration and restraint in anticipation of future reward. In addition, it remains to be established how 5-HT2C receptors gate the influence of internal versus cue-driven processes over reward-guided actions. To elucidate these issues, we investigated the effects of administering the 5-HT2C receptor antagonist SB242084, both systemically and directly into the nucleus accumbens core (NAcC), in rats performing a Go/No-Go task for small or large rewards. The results were compared to the administration of d-amphetamine into the NAcC, which has previously been shown to promote behavioural activation. Systemic perturbation of 5-HT2C receptors—but crucially not intra-NAcC infusions—consistently boosted rats' performance and instrumental vigour on Go trials when they were required to act. Concomitantly, systemic administration also reduced their ability to withhold responding for rewards on No-Go trials, particularly late in the holding period. Notably, these effects were often apparent only when the reward on offer was small. By contrast, inducing a hyperdopaminergic state in the NAcC with d-amphetamine strongly impaired response restraint on No-Go trials both early and late in the holding period, as well as speeding action initiation. Together, these findings suggest that 5-HT2C receptor transmission, outside the NAcC, shapes the vigour of ongoing goal-directed action as well as the likelihood of responding as a function of expected reward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]