Cognitive fatigue of executive processes: Interaction between interference resolution tasks
Section snippets
Participants
Forty-eight young adults (24 male; age range: 18–30 years) recruited from the University of Michigan community through posted advertisements, gave informed consent, were native English speakers and had normal or corrected to normal vision. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups: one received high interference working memory task training, and the other group received low interference working memory training. This investigation was approved by the University of Michigan
Results
For all analyses, in all experiments, subjects’ medians were used to minimize the effect of extreme values on the distribution. Test-retest performance on the verb generate task is shown in Table 1, where improvement in the speed of performance is generally evident between pre and post sessions. This improvement is presumably due to practice on verb generation, and is commensurate with practice effects we have observed on this task in other studies (Persson et al., 2004). In several prior data
Results
Test-retest performance on the verb generate task is shown in Table 1. The approach to data analysis is similar to Experiment 1, including the calculation of the IR-scores.
First, analysis of the stop-signal data showed that the high inhibition group performed more accurately than the low inhibition group (percentage unsuccessful stop trials [high inhibition = 9 percent, low inhibition = 26 percent]; t(46) = −2.17, P < .05). The high inhibition group also had longer RTs (567 ms) on GO trials than the low
Results
Test-retest performance on the episodic task is shown in Table 1. Data from the working memory task are shown in Table 2. Response time was calculated for correct responses only. The approach to data analysis is similar to Experiments 1 and 2. For the transfer task, the effect of interference was calculated by subtracting the RTs for low interference trials from the RTs for high interference trials (i.e., high PI vs. low PI). Similarly, the interference effect for accuracy (expressed as the
Discussion
In this investigation, we tested the hypothesis that interference resolution is mediated by a separable executive process that is shared by tasks in different cognitive domains. Our goal was to provide converging behavioral evidence to complement the existing neuroimaging data suggesting that these tasks share a common neural substrate. The process-specific fatigue effects demonstrated between pairs of tasks, provides behavioral support for their reliance on a common mechanism. In particular,
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Sharon Thompson-Shill and Deanna Barch for providing us with stimulus material for the verb generation task. This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health Grant AG18286.
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