A comparison of two training protocols to improve inhibitory control in healthy adults
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1
University of Wollongong, School of Psychology, Australia
Aims: Inhibitory control – the ability to deliberately suppress dominant, automatic or prepotent responses – is essential for adaptive functioning, with deficits in this ability implicated in various psychiatric and neurological disorders. Despite a recent upsurge of positive findings regarding the training of other executive functions, whether inhibitory control can be trained and the underlying neural mechanisms remains unclear.
Methods: In the present study, fifty-four adults were randomly assigned to train on either a standard Go/Nogo task (GNG; n = 18), a combined Go/Nogo-Stop-signal (GNG-SS; n = 18) or a Control task (n = 18) during a single training session (8 blocks). Task difficulty was adaptively manipulated in the GNG condition using reaction-time deadline (RTD), while both RTD and stop-signal delay (SSD) were employed in the GNG-SS. The Control task involved counting Go stimuli for the duration of the training. To assess transfer effects, all participants completed identical pre/post assessments using tasks indexing different inhibitory control functions (Go-Nogo, Flanker, Stop-signal), with the post-training assessment taking place in a separate session 3 days later.
Results: Across conditions and task, ERPs revealed decreased N1 and N2, but increased P2 amplitudes at post-training. Relative to the control, the inhibition training conditions showed similar improvements in the active inhibition of responses during the Go-Nogo and Stop-signal task, with ERP analyses showing overlapping increases in fronto-central regions; suggesting a top-down augmentation and near-transfer of inhibitory processes. However, these effects did not extend to the interference control domain, with no training effects seen for the Flanker task.
Conclusions: Overall, these findings suggest that adaptively manipulating task difficulty can lead to improvements in actively inhibiting stimuli in untrained tasks, leading to quantitative changes in brain activity.
Keywords:
Inhibition (Psychology),
event-related potentials (ERPs),
training-induced changes,
Go No Go Task,
flanker task,
stop signal task
Conference:
Australasian Society for Psychophysiology, Inc, Coffs Harbour, Australia, 26 Nov - 28 Nov, 2014.
Presentation Type:
Oral Presentation
Topic:
Psychophysiology
Citation:
Benikos
N,
Johnstone
SJ and
Roodenrys
S
(2014). A comparison of two training protocols to improve inhibitory control in healthy adults.
Conference Abstract:
Australasian Society for Psychophysiology, Inc.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2014.216.00030
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Received:
08 Oct 2014;
Published Online:
02 Dec 2014.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Stuart J Johnstone, University of Wollongong, School of Psychology, Wollongong, NSW, 2522, Australia, sjohnsto@uow.edu.au