The Relationship Between Emotional Regulation And Executive Function

The prediction error signals are the results of our brain’s saving cognitive resources.During this process,its higher representational neurons will create their own template based on the past experience.And with this template,the brain is able to predict the lower level information.However,the external world is always changing,so that it is difficulty for brain to make a 100% correct prediction.Thus,the prediction error signals were born.The strength of these kind of signals reflects the speed and accuracy of brain’s percept of the outside environment,which are of great significance.In recent years,the Mismatch negativity(MMN)is considered to be an effective electrophysiological indicator to reflect the prediction error signals.And this component is usually divided into two kinds,including auditory Mismatch Negativity(aMMN)and visual Mismatch Negativity(vMMN).Some studies show that both of them are significantly correlate with human’s cognitive ability.For example,it was shown that there is a close relationship between aMMN and working memory.And whether the same correlation exists between vMMN and working memory is the main purpose of this study.In experiment 1,thirty-five healthy college students were participated.We had measured their working memory ability through some classic tasks,and vMMN was induced by three types of basic visual materials.The results indicated that the spatial-frequency vMMN at frontal cortex was significantly correlated with the performance in working memory.It also showed that the strong correlation between prediction error signals and working memory was also existed in human’s visual channels.Experiment 2 was operated to further verify the relationship between vMMN and working memory.Working memory training was performed on forty-one healthy subjects to investigate whether the effects of training could be transferred to visual prediction error signals.The results showed that after 15 times cognitive trainings,the working memory ability of the subjects was significantly improved,and the EEG results also showed that the amplitude of vMMN was significantly enhanced compared with that of the pretest.This indicated that working memory training could enhance thestrength of visual prediction error signals,and further proved the close correlation between working memory and visual prediction error signals.