Processing speed is an important construct in understanding cognition. This study was aimed to control task specificity for understanding the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive processing speed. Forty young adult subjects performed attention tasks of two modalities (auditory and visual) and two levels of task rules (compatible and incompatible). Block-design fMRI captured BOLD signals during the tasks. Thirteen regions of interest were defined with reference to publicly available activation maps for processing speed tasks. Cognitive speed was derived from task reaction times, which yielded six sets of connectivity measures. Mixed-effect LASSO regression revealed six significant paths suggestive of a cerebello-frontal network predicting the cognitive speed. Among them, three are long range (two fronto-cerebellar, one cerebello-frontal), and three are short range (fronto-frontal, cerebello-cerebellar, and cerebello-thalamic). The long-range connections are likely to relate to cognitive control, and the short-range connections relate to rule-based stimulus-response processes. The revealed neural network suggests that automaticity, acting on the task rules and interplaying with effortful top-down attentional control, accounts for cognitive speed.

中文翻译：

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前额小脑连接调节认知处理速度

处理速度是理解认知的一个重要结构。本研究旨在控制任务特异性，以了解认知处理速度的神经机制。四十名年轻成人受试者执行两种模式（听觉和视觉）和两个级别的任务规则（兼容和不兼容）的注意力任务。块设计 fMRI 在任务期间捕获 BOLD 信号。参考公开可用的激活图定义了 13 个感兴趣的区域，用于处理速度任务。认知速度来源于任务反应时间，它产生了六组连通性测量。混合效应 LASSO 回归揭示了六个重要的路径，表明小脑-额叶网络预测认知速度。其中3个是远射（两个额小脑，一个小脑额），三个是短程（额叶、小脑-小脑和小脑-丘脑）。长程联系可能与认知控制有关，而短程联系可能与基于规则的刺激-反应过程有关。揭示的神经网络表明，根据任务规则采取行动并与努力自上而下的注意力控制相互作用，是认知速度的原因。