What can Your Cognitive Control Tell – Study

How efficient are you when it comes to start a task and stick with it, all the way through, without getting disrupted by the temptations of the internet or any other priorities? This ability of an individual to make plans or goals, and carry them out without losing focus, is called cognitive control. It may be substantially among healthy individuals. Any problems with cognitive control have been linked to many neuropsychiatric disorders.

However, there are still unexplained reasons for cognitive control such as – Exactly how and why does cognitive control vary from person to person? Which areas of the brain are involved? How does brain activity relate to behavior?

To better understand the idea of cognitive control, scientists at the Washington University in St. Louis have suggested that differences in the cognitive control among the healthy are a matter of degree, as per their study published online in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

Cognitive Control

The study team has devised a research framework that not only uses a full battery of cognitive tests but also looks at them across a variety of conditions to obtain more generalizable answers.

The team performed four tests of psychology standards – a Stroop task, an AX-CPT task, a Cued-TS paradigm, and a Sternberg task under three conditions. They were baseline conditions akin to a pop quiz, a proactive condition, and a reactive condition.

The brain activities of the participants were also measured during their cognitive control activities using functional MRI.

It was found that the participants’ brains were in distinct states in each of the three conditions, indicating that there is a qualitative difference when it comes to engaging cognitive control in different situations.

“We found consistency across the four tasks in these brain regions but people varied in degree. Most importantly, and as expected, the changes in brain activity were mirrored by changes in task performance levels: the participants varied in the way they engaged their cognitive control. Together, these findings suggest to the research team that the results are more generalizable. We believe that our work and data already provide a valuable resource to the scientific community. And we are hoping that both our team and others can build on this foundation, to understand, more fully, why cognitive control is so important, but also so variable, among people,” says Todd Braver, professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences, along with appointments in radiology and neuroscience at the School of Medicine, at Washington University in St. Louis.

Source-Medindia