Special Issue “The Brain’s Brake”: Research ReportSupramodal executive control of attention: Evidence from unimodal and crossmodal dual conflict effects
Introduction
In current times, the boundaries of our brain computations are being pushed further and further, with the number of tasks, whether competing or synergistic, steadily increasing. In a hypothetical morning routine, many of us are constantly dealing with conflicting sources of information, all attempting to access our conscious experience. One of the more remarkable functions of our brain is to solve these conflicts, but we often experience a hard limit on how much we can effectively deal with at one time when there is another conflict to resolve. When we find ourselves in a situation that exceeds our computational capacity, interference across concurrent conflict processes may arise, negatively impacting our performance. The reason for such a computational bottleneck (Shannon, 1948; Trautwein, Singer, & Kanske, 2016; Wu, Wang, et al., 2019), initially a topic disputed between cognitive psychology and cognitive science (e.g., see Lake, Ullman, Tenenbaum, & Gershman, 2017), is now being investigated under new lenses due to the development of cognitive computational models (Kriegeskorte & Douglas, 2018). Yet, it is still up to debate why humans have such a bottleneck, and more importantly, how this computational mechanism becomes responsible for the information-processing limit.
Growing evidence seems to indicate that one of the subcomponents of attention according to a renowned model (Fan, McCandliss, Sommer, Raz, & Posner, 2002; Petersen & Posner, 2012), the executive control, has limited resources and may be a candidate for the central bottleneck. The executive control of attention is the brain system devoted to inhibit competing messages reaching from sources deemed irrelevant and to support the processing of multisensory inputs from relevant sources (Diamond, 2013; Fan, Flombaum, McCandliss, Thomas, & Posner, 2003; Fan, Fossella, Sommer, Wu, & Posner, 2003; Fan et al., 2009; Fan, Hof, Guise, Fossella, & Posner, 2008; Fan et al., 2007; Martín-Signes, Paz-Alonso, & Chica, 2019; Mullane, Lawrence, Corkum, Klein, & McLaughlin, 2016; Posner, 2012; Spagna, Dong, et al., 2015; Spagna, Kim, Wu, & Fan, 2018; Tian et al., 2016; Trautwein et al., 2016). This system has been shown to act supramodally by integrating stimuli coming from different modalities and cognitive domains, and is in charge of the conflict resolution among competing stimuli to promote an efficient interaction with the environment (Donohue, Liotti, Perez, & Woldorff, 2012; Farah, Wong, Monheit, & Morrow, 1989; Green, Doesburg, Ward, & McDonald, 2011; Ljubojevic et al., 2018; Martín-Signes et al., 2019; Ricciardi, Bonino, Pellegrini, & Pietrini, 2014; Roberts & Hall, 2008; Spagna et al., 2017; Spagna, Mackie, & Fan, 2015). The existence of a unified supramodal function better manages the economic trade-offs inherent in all the biological organisms (Bullmore & Sporns, 2012), while allowing to efficiently coordinate multisensory information as opposed to modality-dependent centres, but comes with the cost of stricter amount of resources available (Kriegeskorte & Douglas, 2018; Spagna, Mackie, et al., 2015).
Yet, the majority of the studies that examined supramodal control functions relied on examining the correlation between measurements of the conflict effect estimated in separate visual and auditory tasks (e.g., Roberts & Hall, 2008; Spagna et al., 2017; Spagna, Mackie, et al., 2015), providing only indirect evidence for such claim. For example, we have recently shown that within-subject behavioral measures of the executive control of attention measured by the flanker conflict effect are correlated across a visual and an auditory task (Spagna, Mackie, et al., 2015), and that a deficit of this mechanism is associated with psychiatric disorders that heavily taps on cognitive disfunctions such as schizophrenia (Spagna et al., 2017). Further, conjunction of separate visual and auditory activation maps in neuroimaging studies, which rely on the similarities between the spatial distribution of the activation of brain areas and networks found during unimodal conflict resolution (e.g., Donohue et al., 2012; Green et al., 2011), provided evidence for the existence of supramodal executive control mechanisms. However, the correlational nature of the measures obtained in our study as well as of the above-mentioned neuroimaging studies could not provide direct evidence demonstrating that the mechanisms for conflict resolution arising from stimuli in different modalities (i.e., crossmodal conflict) is implemented by the same executive control of attention mechanisms.
In this study, we conducted a direct test of the supramodal hypothesis by testing whether the executive control of attention is the central bottleneck responsible for handling the interference across competing tasks irrespectively of whether information comes from a single modality or from multiple modalities. We contrasted the behavioral performance in a crossmodal version of the dual conflict paradigm to a unimodal version and added a manipulation of time constraints to examine the interference effect on information processing of two conflict tasks when the processing overlaps temporally. The hypothesis that the supramodal executive control of attention is similarly involved in the information processing of both the unimodal and crossmodal conflict resolution would be supported by findings of comparable dual task conflict interference effect in both unimodal and crossmodal paradigms for an additive or a supra-additive interference effect with an increase in response time of the second task modulated by the conflict condition of the first task.
Section snippets
Participants
A total of 91 undergraduate students of the Psychology Department at Queens College of the City University of New York (CUNY) participated in this study for course requirements and were compensated with course credit. We report how we determined our sample size, all data exclusions, all inclusion/exclusion criteria were established prior to data analysis, as well as manipulations and measures used in the study. Forty-eight participants completed Experiment 1, while the other 43 participants
Results
Fig. 2 shows T1-locked and T2-locked performance separately for the UV-DCP (left two columns) and CM-DCP (right two columns) at each level of the SOA. Table 2 shows T1-and T2-locked mean (± SD) response time in ms and Error Rate in percentage for each experimental condition and separately for the two tasks.
Discussion
Moving beyond previous correlational evidence of conflict resolution measures in unimodal tasks (e.g., Spagna et al., 2017; Spagna, Mackie, et al., 2015), this study provides direct evidence of the supramodal function of the executive control of attention by showing that the significant interference produced by the dual conflict paradigm (specifically, the interaction between SOA and T1 Congruency) followed the same trajectory in unimodal and crossmodal processing. Results from this study
Author contributions
J.F., A.S., and T.W. designed the experiments; A.S. analyzed the data. All authors discussed the results and contributed to writing up the report. Anonymized behavioral data and the code to necessary to reproduce all the analyses and data presentations reported in the manuscript can be found on the GitHub page of A.S. No part of the study procedures or analyses was preregistered prior to the research being conducted.
Open practices
The study in this article earned Open Materials and Open Data badges for transparent practices. Materials and data for the study are available at https://github.com/alfredospagna/Supramodal-Dual-Conflict-Paradigms/blob/master/README.md.
References (61)
- et al.
Multisensory integration in hemianopia and unilateral spatial neglect: Evidence from the sound induced flash illusion
Neuropsychologia
(2016) - et al.
Inhibition processes are dissociable and lateralized in human prefrontal cortex
Neuropsychologia
(2016) - et al.
A dual-networks architecture of top-down control
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
(2008) The multiple-demand (MD) system of the primate brain: Mental programs for intelligent behaviour
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
(2010)The structure of cognition: Attentional episodes in mind and brain
Neuron
(2013)- et al.
Cognitive and brain consequences of conflict
Neuroimage
(2003) - et al.
Testing the behavioral interaction and integration of attentional networks
Brain and Cognition
(2009) - et al.
The activation of attentional networks
Neuroimage
(2005) - et al.
Parietal lobe mechanisms of spatial attention: Modality-specific or supramodal?
Neuropsychologia
(1989) - et al.
Material-specific interference control is dissociable and lateralized in human prefrontal cortex
Neuropsychologia
(2014)
Cognitive control and attentional functions
Brain and Cognition
Imaging attention networks
Neuroimage
Mind the blind brain to understand the sighted one! Is there a supramodal cortical functional architecture?
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
Clozapine improves the orienting of attention in schizophrenia
Schizophrenia Research
Distraction by irrelevant sound during foreperiods selectively impairs temporal preparation
Acta Psychologica
Functional dissociations in temporal preparation: Evidence from dual-task performance
Cognition
Domain-independent neural underpinning of task-switching: An fMRI investigation
Cortex
Dissociating temporal preparation processes as a function of the inter-trial interval duration
Cognition
Structural hemispheric asymmetries underlie verbal Stroop performance
Behavioural Brain Research
Anterior insular cortex is a bottleneck of cognitive control
Neuroimage
The activation of interactive attentional networks
Neuroimage
Time uncertainty and choice reaction time
Nature
A general factor involved in dual task performance decrement
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: Section A
Measuring attentional demand in continuous dual-task performance
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A
The economy of brain network organization
Nature Reviews Neuroscience
What is consciousness, and could machines have it?
Science
Executive functions
Annual Review of Psychology
Is conflict monitoring supramodal? Spatiotemporal dynamics of cognitive control processes in an auditory stroop task
Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience
Effects of noise letters upon the identification of a target letter in a nonsearch task
Perception & Psychophysics
Cited by (13)
Visual mental imagery: Inside the mind's eyes
2022, Handbook of Clinical NeurologyCitation Excerpt :This network is composed of the frontal eye fields and of the areas near and along the intraparietal sulcus. Together with the cingulo-opercular network (Dosenbach et al., 2008; Sadaghiani and D'Esposito, 2015; Sheffield et al., 2015; Dubis et al., 2016), these regions seem to support multiple-task demands (Duncan, 2010; Shashidhara et al., 2019) in a supra-modal and supra-domain fashion (Spagna et al., 2015, 2020; Wu et al., 2020). The implication of frontoparietal networks in VMI is broadly consistent with lesion location in spatial neglect for visual mental images (Bisiach and Luzzatti, 1978), which can occur after a lesion to the network in the right hemisphere (Guariglia et al., 1993; Bartolomeo et al., 1994; Rode et al., 2010; Bartolomeo, 2021b).
Is the prefrontal cortex organized by supramodal or modality-specific sensory demands during adolescence?
2021, Developmental Cognitive NeuroscienceCitation Excerpt :However, the majority of these studies only included youths up to age 12, with a notable absence of work conducted during adolescence. It was traditionally assumed that there were different networks for attention to visual (dorsal frontoparietal cortex) relative to auditory (frontotemporal cortex) stimuli across major brain lobules (Braga et al., 2013, 2017), but that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) served in a supramodal capacity (Rahnev, 2017; Spagna et al., 2015, 2020; Wu et al., 2020a,b). However, non-human primate data (Barbas and Mesulam, 1985; Medalla and Barbas, 2014) and emerging evidence from adults (Braga et al., 2013, 2017; Mayer et al., 2017; Michalka et al., 2015; Noyce et al., 2017) suggest that activity in the lateral PFC may also be stratified dependent on the sensory modality during multisensory stimulation.
Activation of the cognitive control network associated with information uncertainty
2021, NeuroImageCitation Excerpt :Taken together, direct examination of the involvement of the CCN in the processing of information conveyed by context and event has heuristic value for understanding the functional property of the CCN in relation to information entropy and surprise. Recruitment of the CCN to process information inputs from different sensory modalities (e.g., visual and auditory) would provide evidence for a general role of the CCN in cognitive control independent of modality, i.e., supra-modal (Spagna et al., 2015, 2020; Wu et al., 2020). Evidence that CCN activation mediates the relationship between the information amount and the behavioral performance would inform us about how the brain implements cognitive control to coordinate thoughts (uncertainty representation and resolution) and actions (motor generation) under uncertainty (as in Wu et al., 2018).