The Effect Of Working Memory Training On High Level Of Impulsivity In Response Inhibition And Decision Making

BackgroundImpulsivity is a multi-dimensional personality structure,and high impulsivity individuals exist a sequence of actions that can not inhibit response,process information too quickly,can not delay gratification,and give little thought before they acting.Some researchers have shown that impulsivity is associated with the underlying problems of self-regulation and is manifested in the failure of will-being behaviors that can lead to greater negative results,and it is significantly associated with many indicators of poor self-regulation.Therefore,working memory ability may influence the related mechanism between impulsivity problems and self-regulation to some extent.ObjectiveExploring the starting amount of the Iowa experiment task,which is more suitable for distinguishing impulsivity between 1000 yuan and 2000 yuan,intervened high impulsivity with WMT,and used self-reported scales and behavioral experiments to test the effectiveness of the intervention.MethodsFour groups of participants,1000 yuan priming high impulsivity group,2000 yuan priming high impulsivity group,1000 yuan priming low impulsivity group and 2000 yuan priming low impulsivity group（18²2 years old,M=18.72,SD=1.19）（Experiment 1）.Randomly selected 47 subjects in high impulsivity group and 28 low impulsivity subjects.They all got the informed consent by volunteering to participate in this study.The high impulsivity group was randomly divided into digital（23）and verbal（24）n-back working memory training.The two groups were trained for approximately 40 minutes per day for28 consecutive days followed by Go/Nogo tasks and 1000 yuan priming for the IGT.Results In Experiment 1,the experimental results show that,（1）regardless of 1000 or 2000 yuan priming in the IGT high impulsivity individuals made no progress in selecting strategy along with time course of the decision making and preferred to chose high win-cards in spite of potential high punishment.（2）1000 yuan priming low impulsivity individuals are more sensitive with loss feedback,but 2000 yuan priming low impulsivity group was more sensitive to reward feedback.And the net scores of the IGT in 2000 yuan priming low impulsivity individuals were no significantly with 2000 yuan,F（1,103）=0.105,P>0.05.In the second experiment,the experimental results showed that the performance of the high impulsivity group in n-back WMT was significantly improved[F_{digital group}（2,68）=16.393,P<0.01;F_{verbal group}（2,71）=38.502,P<0.01].The repeated measure variance analysis of the Barratt impulsivity scale 11th edition（BIS-11）scores before and after training showed that the total score,attention impulsivity and the unplanned impulsivity varied significantly with the different stages of training[F（2,44）=9.870,P<0.01;F（2,44）=3.917,P<0.05;F（2,44）=10.909,P<0.01];in the Go-Nogo,the task showed that as the training time progressed,both groups showed an increase in their level of behavioral inhibition,F（3,70）=3.734,P<0.05;in the IGT,over time,their net score has a significant increase,F（12,61）=2.990,P<0.01.Conclusion1.The IGT with priming an amount of 1,000 makes it easier to distinguish between different impulsivity levels in their decision making.2.Working memory training significantly reduced the scores of high impulsivity individuals on the BIS-11 scale,except for the motor impulsivity,and the level of behavioral inhibition and risk decision-making.