In general, executive function can be thought of as the set of abilities required to effortfully guide behavior toward a goal, especially in nonroutine situations. Psychologists are interested in ...expanding the understanding of executive function because it is thought to be a key process in intelligent behavior, it is compromised in a variety of psychiatric and neurological disorders, it varies across the life span, and it affects performance in complicated environments, such as the cockpits of advanced aircraft. This article provides a brief introduction to the concept of executive function and discusses how it is assessed and the conditions under which it is compromised. A short overview of the diverse theoretical viewpoints regarding its psychological and biological underpinnings is also provided. The article concludes with a consideration of how a multilevel approach may provide a more integrated account of executive function than has been previously available.
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This article argues that the Stroop effect can be generated at a variety of stages from stimulus input to response selection. As such, there are multiple loci at which the Stroop effect occurs. ...Evidence for this viewpoint is provided by a review of neuroimaging studies that were specifically designed to isolate levels of interference in the Stroop task and the underlying neural systems that work to control the effects of interference at those levels. In particular, the evidence suggests that lateral prefrontal regions work to bias processing toward the task-relevant dimension of a Stroop stimulus (e.g., its color) and away from the task-irrelevant dimension (e.g., the meaning of the word). Medial prefrontal regions, in contrast, tend to be more involved in response-related and late-stage aspects of control. Importantly, it is argued that this control occurs in a cascade-like manner, such that the degree of control that is exerted at earlier stages influences the degree of control that needs to be exerted at later stages. As such, the degree of behavioral interference that is observed is the culmination of processing in specific brain regions as well as their interaction.
The functional organization of human medial frontal cortex (MFC) is a subject of intense study. Using fMRI, the MFC has been associated with diverse psychological processes, including motor function, ...cognitive control, affect, and social cognition. However, there have been few large-scale efforts to comprehensively map specific psychological functions to subregions of medial frontal anatomy. Here we applied a meta-analytic data-driven approach to nearly 10,000 fMRI studies to identify putatively separable regions of MFC and determine which psychological states preferentially recruit their activation. We identified regions at several spatial scales on the basis of meta-analytic coactivation, revealing three broad functional zones along a rostrocaudal axis composed of 2-4 smaller subregions each. Multivariate classification analyses aimed at identifying the psychological functions most strongly predictive of activity in each region revealed a tripartite division within MFC, with each zone displaying a relatively distinct functional signature. The posterior zone was associated preferentially with motor function, the middle zone with cognitive control, pain, and affect, and the anterior with reward, social processing, and episodic memory. Within each zone, the more fine-grained subregions showed distinct, but subtler, variations in psychological function. These results provide hypotheses about the functional organization of medial prefrontal cortex that can be tested explicitly in future studies.
Activation of medial frontal cortex in fMRI studies is associated with a wide range of psychological states ranging from cognitive control to pain. However, this high rate of activation makes it challenging to determine how these various processes are topologically organized across medial frontal anatomy. We conducted a meta-analysis across nearly 10,000 studies to comprehensively map psychological states to discrete subregions in medial frontal cortex using relatively unbiased data-driven methods. This approach revealed three distinct zones that differed substantially in function, each of which were further subdivided into 2-4 smaller subregions that showed additional functional variation. Each individual region was recruited by multiple psychological states, suggesting subregions of medial frontal cortex are functionally heterogeneous.
The goal of the current study was to examine the pattern of anatomical connectivity of the human frontal pole so as to inform theories of function of the frontal pole, perhaps one of the least ...understood region of the human brain. Rather than simply parcellating the frontal pole into subregions, we focused on examining the brain regions to which the frontal pole is anatomically and functionally connected. While the current findings provided support for previous work suggesting the frontal pole is connected to higher-order sensory association cortex, we found novel evidence suggesting that the frontal pole in humans is connected to posterior visual cortex. Furthermore, we propose a functional framework that incorporates these anatomical connections with existing cognitive theories of the functional organization of the frontal pole. In addition to a previously discussed medial-lateral distinction, we propose a dorsal-ventral gradient based on the information the frontal pole uses to guide behavior. We propose that dorsal regions are connected to other prefrontal regions that process goals and action plans, medial regions are connected to other brain regions that monitor action outcomes and motivate behaviors, and ventral regions connect to regions that process information about stimuli, values, and emotion. By incorporating information across these different levels of information, the frontal pole can effectively guide goal-directed behavior.
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Twin studies to GWAS: there and back again Friedman, Naomi P.; Banich, Marie T.; Keller, Matthew C.
Trends in cognitive sciences,
10/2021, Volume:
25, Issue:
10
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The field of human behavioral genetics has come full circle. It began by using twin/family studies to estimate the relative importance of genetic and environmental influences. As large-scale ...genotyping became cost-effective, genome-wide association studies (GWASs) yielded insights about the nature of genetic influences and new methods that use GWAS data to estimate heritability and genetic correlations invigorated the field. Yet these newer GWAS methods have not replaced twin/family studies. In this review, we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the two approaches with respect to characterizing genetic and environmental influences, measurement of behavioral phenotypes, and evaluation of causal models, with a particular focus on cognitive neuroscience. This discussion highlights how twin/family studies and GWAS complement and mutually reinforce one another.
Traditional twin/family studies and genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are complementary methods for behavioral genetic research.Twin/family studies estimate aggregate genetic and environmental influences on a trait, while GWAS suggest more specific plausible biological mechanisms.Estimates of genetic (co)variance from these two approaches have different assumptions, require different sample sizes for adequate power, and have distinct interpretations.Twin/family studies typically examine deep phenotypes, such as executive functioning or memory; GWAS tend to focus on general phenotypes (e.g., intelligence), often minimally assessed, that can be administered in large samples or harmonized across multiple studies.Data from both approaches can be used to test causal models. Family data can be used to control for confounds in GWAS and probe gene–environment interplay.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
The ABCD study is recruiting and following the brain development and health of over 10,000 9–10 year olds through adolescence. The imaging component of the study was developed by the ABCD Data ...Analysis and Informatics Center (DAIC) and the ABCD Imaging Acquisition Workgroup. Imaging methods and assessments were selected, optimized and harmonized across all 21 sites to measure brain structure and function relevant to adolescent development and addiction. This article provides an overview of the imaging procedures of the ABCD study, the basis for their selection and preliminary quality assurance and results that provide evidence for the feasibility and age-appropriateness of procedures and generalizability of findings to the existent literature.
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Contemporary perspectives on age differences in risk taking, informed by advances in developmental neuroscience, have emphasized the need to examine the ways in which emotional and cognitive factors ...interact to influence decision making. In the present study, a diverse sample of 901 individuals between the ages of 10 and 30 were administered a modified version of the Iowa Gambling Task, which is designed to measure affective decision making. Results indicate that approach behaviors (operationalized as the tendency to play increasingly from the advantageous decks over the course of the task) display an inverted U-shape relation to age, peaking in mid- to late adolescence. In contrast, avoidance behaviors (operationalized as the tendency to refrain from playing from the disadvantageous decks) increase linearly with age, with adults avoiding disadvantageous decks at higher rates than both preadolescents and adolescents. The finding that adolescents, compared to adults, are relatively more approach oriented in response to positive feedback and less avoidant in response to negative feedback is consistent with recent studies of brain development, as well as epidemiological data on various types of risky behavior, and may have important practical implications for the prevention of adolescent risk taking.
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Individuals who depressively ruminate about their current dysphoria tend to perseverate more than nonruminators. The goal of the current study was to determine whether such perseverative tendencies ...are associated with an inability to switch attention away from old to new information or with an inability to effectively inhibit the processing of previously relevant information. We used a task-switching paradigm that can distinguish between these two processes. Two experiments showed that depressive rumination is associated with a deficit in inhibiting prior mental sets. The second experiment also demonstrated that, in contrast to depressive rumination, angry and intellectual rumination are associated with difficulties in switching to a new task set, but not with inhibition of a prior task set. This study suggests that different forms of rumination are associated with different cognitive mechanisms and that both deficits may contribute to the perseveration that is associated with ruminative tendencies.
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•Using data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, we identified four distinct and reproducible RSFC subtypes in children aged 9-11.•Our approach involved an innovative methodological ...pipeline with several phases: identification, Validation, Evaluation, Prediction, and Replication. Each phase played a critical role in confirming the reliability and importance of the RSFC subtypes.•In the Identification phase, we used Leiden Community Detection to define the RSFC subtypes. The Validation phase confirmed their reproducibility through a robust split-sample technique.•The Evaluation phase revealed that each RSFC subtype is associated with unique cognitive and mental health profiles.•Our Prediction phase showed that these subtypes can more accurately predict various cognitive and mental health characteristics than individual RSFC connections.•Lastly, the Replication stage used bootstrapping and down-sampling to further substantiate the reproducibility of these subtypes.
The current study demonstrates that an individual's resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) is a dependable biomarker for identifying differential patterns of cognitive and emotional functioning during late childhood. Using baseline RSFC data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, which includes children aged 9-11, we identified four distinct RSFC subtypes. We introduce an integrated methodological pipeline for testing the reliability and importance of these subtypes. In the Identification phase, Leiden Community Detection defined RSFC subtypes, with their reproducibility confirmed through a split-sample technique in the Validation stage. The Evaluation phase showed that distinct cognitive and mental health profiles are associated with each subtype, with the Predictive phase indicating that subtypes better predict various cognitive and mental health characteristics than individual RSFC connections. The Replication stage employed bootstrapping and down-sampling methods to substantiate the reproducibility of these subtypes further. This work allows future explorations of developmental trajectories of these RSFC subtypes.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Whether memories can be suppressed has been a controversial issue in psychology and cognitive neuroscience for decades. We found evidence that emotional memories are suppressed via two ...time-differentiated neural mechanisms: (i) an initial suppression by the right inferior frontal gyrus over regions supporting sensory components of the memory representation (visual cortex, thalamus), followed by (ii) right medial frontal gyrus control over regions supporting multimodal and emotional components of the memory representation (hippocampus, amygdala), both of which are influenced by fronto-polar regions. These results indicate that memory suppression does occur and, at least in nonpsychiatric populations, is under the control of prefrontal regions.
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