Impact of conflict expectation on selective attention and action selection processes during motor decisions: an EEG study
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1
Université catholique de Louvain, Institute of Neuroscience, Belgium
Any behavior emerges from a competition between potential options, occurring at both the sensory and motor levels. At the sensory level, selective attention is thought to bias competitive interactions by favoring neural activity related to goal-relevant sensory information (Derosiere et al., 2015). At the motor level, control processes help ensure that activity related to the most beneficial action reaches a selection threshold, while keeping irrelevant alternatives away from it (Quoilin and Derosiere, 2015). At the behavioral level, conflictual stimuli lengthen reaction times and reduce accuracy, probably because they increase load on both sensorimotor processes. However, the presence of statistical regularities in the occurrence of conflict can attenuate the cost of incongruent stimuli, an effect that has been related to the recruitment of additional cognitive control processes (Klein et al., 2014). Here, we investigated the impact of conflict expectation on selective attention and action selection processes.
Healthy subjects (n=17) performed a Flanker task in which they were asked to indicate by a left or right button-press the orientation of a briefly presented left- or right-facing central arrow, flanked by a set of two distractor arrows on each side which either pointed in the same (congruent trials) or in the opposite direction (incongruent trials). The percentage of congruent and incongruent trials was manipulated in separate blocks to produce two different contexts in terms of conflict expectation. In mostly congruent blocks (MCB; low conflict expectation), 80% of the trials were congruent; the reversed proportion was used in the mostly incongruent blocks (MIB; high conflict expectation), with 80% of trials involving incongruent stimuli. Selective attention and action selection were assessed in both contexts by recording steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs, central and distractor arrows flickered at different frequencies) and response-locked potentials measured over the ipsilateral and contralateral motor cortices (with respect to the responding hand), respectively.
As expected, subjects made more errors and responded slower in incongruent than in congruent trials. This behavioral cost of conflict was particularly marked in contexts where incongruent trials were unlikely (MCB) compared to when they were expected (MIB). At the sensory level, we observed higher target-related SSVEP amplitudes in MCB compared to MIB, indicating that subjects focused more on the target when conflict was unlikely. At the motor level, ipsilateral response-locked potentials were of smaller amplitude in MCB compared to MIB, especially in incongruent trials, suggesting less irrelevant motor activity when conflict was unlikely. Interestingly, the more subjects focused on the target, the smaller the ipsilateral activity. These findings suggest that a stronger attentional focus on the target helps reduce ipsilateral motor activity and that this strategy is mostly used when conflictual signals may occur in a non-predictive manner.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by grants from the “Fonds Spéciaux de Recherche” (FSR) of the Université Catholique de Louvain, the Belgian National Funds for Scientific Research (FRS-FNRS: MIS F.4512.14), the “Fondation Médicale Reine Elisabeth” (FMRE), and the Marie Sklodowska-Curie actions (MSCA-CoFund). GD was a postdoctoral fellow supported by the FNRS and by a MOVE-IN Louvain grant. AZ was a Senior Research Associate supported by INNOVIRIS.
References
Derosiere, G., Farrugia, N., Perrey, S., Ward, T., & Torre, K. (2015). Expectations induced by natural-like temporal fluctuations are independent of attention decrement: Evidence from behavior and early visual evoked potentials. NeuroImage, 104, 278-286.
Quoilin, C., & Derosiere, G. (2015). Global and specific motor inhibitory mechanisms during action preparation. Journal of Neuroscience, 35(50), 16297-16299.
Klein, P. A., Petitjean, C., Olivier, E., & Duque, J. (2014). Top-down suppression of incompatible motor activations during response selection under conflict. Neuroimage, 86, 138-149.
Keywords:
Decision Making,
Motor Cortex,
Visual Cortex,
selective attention,
action selection
Conference:
12th National Congress of the Belgian Society for Neuroscience, Gent, Belgium, 22 May - 22 May, 2017.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Sensory and Motor Systems
Citation:
Derosiere
G,
Klein
P,
Nozaradan
S,
Mouraux
A,
Zénon
A and
Duque
J
(2019). Impact of conflict expectation on selective attention and action selection processes during motor decisions: an EEG study.
Front. Neurosci.
Conference Abstract:
12th National Congress of the Belgian Society for Neuroscience.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2017.94.00121
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Received:
02 Mar 2017;
Published Online:
25 Jan 2019.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Gerard Derosiere, Université catholique de Louvain, Institute of Neuroscience, Brussels, 1200, Belgium, gerard.derosiere@gmail.com