Mechanisms Of Cognitive Control In In Emotional Majority Function Task

When facing the complex and uncertain environment, humans need flexible cognitive control ability. And with the raise of uncertainty, more cognitive resource was required to make decision. In addition, the emotion imformation can selectively affect the cognitive process to modulate brain neural activity with congitive control; on the other hand, many existing findings suggested that emotion processing is modulated by top-down cognitive control of attention processing. Under the condition of uncertain, the congitive control plays a critical role in mental operation and computation of information processing. However, most previous studies of cognitive control were focused on perceptual level, rarely involved the complex psychological processing of operation and computation.Therefore, the present study used Majority Function Task based on previous fMRI studies incombination with our ERP to investigate the cognitive control under the condition of uncertain. Moreover, we used an emotional variation of the above task(emotional majority function task, E-MFT)to examine the interaction of cognition and emotion under systematically varied informational load. In MFT, arrows with set size 1, 3, and 5 are randomly presented at eight possible locations arranged as an octagon centered on a fixation cross. The arrows point either left or right and are presented simultaneously. The participants’ task is to indicate the direction in which the majority of arrows point. For example, if three arrows are presented, and two point to the left and one to the right, the correct response should be “left”. In E-MFT, we replaced arrows with emotional faces(happy, fear and neural).Our behavioral results suggested that the positive change in RT across conditions can represent the differences in the computational load. In addition, both without and without implicit emotion require the use of similar strategies(grouping search) in information processing. The ERP results showed that both in MFT and E-MFT the amplify of P300 was low under the conditions of high uncertain, and this phenomenon was also appeared in LPC. Comparing the ERPs during the two tasks, the latency of N200 has significant difference in MFT, but not in E-MFT. What’s more, the amplify of P300 in MFT was higher than that in E-MFT. sLORETA results suggested that the processing of cognitive control was located in the frontal and parietal-occipital area.The present study demonstrated that(1) cognitive control, advanced mental processing for uncertain information, was implemented by algorithms of mental operations, but not the processing on perception level.(2) Attention could be captured by bottom-up processing of implicit emotional information, and disturbed the monitoring of task conflict. This early perception of conflict of emotional information(N200) have an affect on the later response choice(P300).(3) The increase of uncertain will decrease the confidence of decision making which reflected in the reduce amplify of P300.