Elsevier

Cortex

Volume 133, December 2020, Pages 266-276
Cortex

Special Issue “The Brain’s Brake”: Research Report
Supramodal executive control of attention: Evidence from unimodal and crossmodal dual conflict effects

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2020.09.018Get rights and content

Abstract

Although we have demonstrated that the executive control of attention acts supramodally as shown by significant correlation between conflict effect measures in visual and auditory tasks, no direct evidence of the equivalence in the computational mechanisms governing the allocation of executive control resources within and across modalities has been found. Here, in two independent groups of 40 participants each, we examined the interaction effect of conflict processing in both unimodal (visual) and crossmodal (visual and auditory) dual-conflict paradigms (flanker conflict processing in Task 1 and then in the following Task 2) with a manipulation of the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA). In both the unimodal and the crossmodal dual-conflict paradigms, the conflict processing of Task 1 significantly interfered with the processing of Task 2 when the SOA was short, as shown by an additive interference effect of Task 1 on Task 2 under the time constraints. These results suggest that there is a unified supramodal entity that supports conflict processing by implementing comparable mechanisms in unimodal and crossmodal scenarios.

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.

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