John Balseiro, “Investigating the Role of Proactive and Reactive Control on Cognitive Inhibition”
Mentor: Han Joo Lee, Psychology, Letters & Science (College of)
Poster #69
The extent to which our cognitive control functions is vital in responding to conflicts in daily situations. This includes proactive (top-down) inhibitory control which is anticipated adjustments to sensorimotor processes in response to an expected conflict, and reactive (bottom-up) inhibitory control which is the activation of sensorimotor processing only immediately after conflict arises thus, the current study aims to characterize the neural markers associated with reactive and proactive inhibitory control. 70 participants completed a modified flanker task measuring proactive and reactive inhibitory control whilst EEG data was acquired. This task consisted of participants determining the direction of an arrow (target stimulus), whilst ignoring surrounding ones (flankers). Flankers were either congruent (directionally matched) or incongruent (directionally opposed) and preceded by distinct predictive cues (black, green, and red), indicative of the upcoming trial type. It is hypothesized that predictive cueing (i.e., proactive control) will improve performance during high conflict incongruent trials and will be indexed by a greater N2 ERP (neural index of conflict monitoring) during cueing. Characterizing the neural markers of proactive (top-down) and reactive (bottom-up) control are critical to improving our understanding of how inhibitory control mechanisms regulate conflict. Future research can seek to examine proactive and reactive control in clinical samples to examine the neurocognitive underpinnings of various psychopathologies (e.g., ADHD, Schizophrenia, and Anxiety Disorders).