The Relationship Research Between Activated Goal In Different Conscious States And Executive Functions

The present research took advantage of the classic “memory-probe” paradigm in three sub-studies. In the first study, participants were distributed randomly among three group, respectively, goal activated consciously, goal activated unconsciously and no-goal activated control group. Afterwards, the participants would have a test about executive function that is aimed at investigating the mechanism towards to different goal activated conditions and executive function. Similarly, compared with the first study, the distinct point is to allot each group’s participants into high or low goal importance in the second study. Furthermore, addition purpose is to explore the impactions on the different goal importance for the goal activated and executive function. The last study, the executive task was divided into reward and no-reward conditions. The participant would get a different value gift based on its performance in the reward condition, nevertheless, the participant could not have a gift whatever its performance in the no-reward condition. Through the three studies’ analysis, we revealed that the goal activation impaired the executive function performance both goal activated consciously and unconsciously conditions, compared the no-goal control group. that is to say, the goal activation occupied the cognitive resource, that is impaired the executive function. As follows,(1) the goal activation impaired the executive function performance both goal activated consciously and unconsciously conditions, compared the no-goal control group. In other words, the performance of these two group is worse than that of control group.(2) Both goal activated consciously and unconsciously conditions, the goal activation would impaired the executive function. That is the recent negative probe is significantly worse than the non-recent probe while the recent positive probe had no difference with non-recent positive probes.(3) The performance of the high goal importance condition is better than that of low goal importance in the executive function task.(4) Whether reward or not in the executive function test, the recent positive probe had no difference with non-recent positive probes. However, in the negative probes, the recent probes is worse than the non-recent probes for the reward condition while the recent probes and the non-recent probes had no difference.(5) The motivation had improved the executive function in the distinctive goal activation condition. In the intrinsic motivation of high goal importance and in the external motivation of reward, both positive and negative conditions, the the recent probes and the non-recent probes had no significantly difference.