Bridging Motor and Cognitive Control: It's About Time!

Errors of attention adaptively warp spatial cognition

Adaptation is the process by which we adjust internal models of the body, world and mind in response to sensory feedback. Although adaptation is studied extensively in the context of motor control, there is limited evidence that cognitive functions such as working memory are subject to the same error-driven adaptive control mechanism. To examine the possibility that internal spatial representations undergo adaptation, we had participants perform a task that interleaved a perceptual discrimination task and a spatial working memory task. Perceptual discrimination trials (85% of trials) presented an initial peripheral cue to exogenously capture attention, immediately followed by a displaced target stimulus. This sequence of events served to repeatedly induce a covert attentional allocation error. Interleaved spatial working memory trials (15% of trials) presented a stimulus at a pseudorandom peripheral location followed by a delay interval. On half of the working memory trials, the stimulus was surreptitiously presented at the same location as the initial attentional cue. We found that as attentional errors accumulated over the course of the experiment, participants' spatial recall shifted to counteract the attentional error. The magnitude of this shift was proportional to the number of induced errors. Recall performance recovered rapidly following the offset of error trials. Multiple control experiments ruled out alternative explanations for these results, such as oculomotor confounds and attentional biases unrelated to error. These findings indicate that the computational mechanisms governing the adaptation of motor commands appear to similarly serve to adjust and calibrate spatial cognition.

The relationship between acute aerobic exercise and inhibitory control in college students: The impact of physical and cognitive engagement

OBJECTIVE

Evidence suggests that acute exercise is an effective way for improving inhibition control, however, the effect of different types of Acute Aerobic Exercise and Inhibitory Control (IC) remains unclear.

METHOD

Using a crossover design, 25 participants (M = 20.20year, SD=0.91) completed 20 min of interventions at 1) moderate intensity exercise, 2) moderate intensity exercise with high cognitive demand (high cognitive-demand exercise), 3) moderate intensity exercise with high physical demand (high physical-demand exercise), and 4) rest condition (low physical and cognitive demand) in a counterbalanced way. Flanker task was completed before and after each intervention to evaluate their inhibitory control ability.

RESULTS

The four interventions significantly reduce reaction times for both congruent and incongruent trials with Flanker task (all P < 0.05). Compared to acute moderate intensity exercise, high physical-demand exercise induced a greater reduction in reaction times for both trial types, whereas high cognitive-demand exercise led to faster reaction times in incongruent trials.

CONCLUSION

Although each intervention effectively enhanced inhibitory control, the exercise demanding high cognitive and physical effort contributed to a more pronounced improvement in inhibitory control performance. This indicates that both increased physical and cognitive engagement can significantly improve the level of inhibitory control in young adults.

Examining the alignment between subjective effort and objective force production

Ratings of Perceived Exertion (RPE) are frequently used to prescribe exercise intensity. A central assumption of using RPE scales is that the subjective perception of effort maps onto objective performance in a consistent way. However, the degree and shape of how RPE aligns with objective performance is not fully understood. Here, we investigate the degree and shape of alignment, as well as how time (i.e., how frequently an effort needs to be performed) and mental effort (i.e., if one has to invest mental effort and physical effort) correspond with the alignment. In a randomized within-subjects experiment, we used a grip-to-scale method that asked participants (N = 43) to repeatedly squeeze a handgrip dynamometer with four to-be-produced RPE target levels relative to their subjective maximum strength (representing 20%, 40%, 60%, or 80%). We found that the RPE-force alignment was not the same across RPE-levels: Whereas subjective differences from 20-40% and 40-60% were met by comparable differences in produced force, a substantially larger difference was observed for the 60-80% interval. Interestingly, exploratory post-hoc analyses revealed that this was mirrored by an increase in variance at the higher effort levels. In addition, at constant RPE-levels, participants produced less force over time, and this effect was more pronounced at lower RPE target levels. Lastly, anticipating mental effort after the physical effort slightly altered the alignment as a function of the to-be-produced RPE-level and experimental duration. Taken together, our results indicate that the mapping of perceived effort on objective performance is intricate, and several factors affect the degree and shape of how RPE and performance align. Understanding the dynamic adjustment of RPE-performance alignment across different RPE levels is particularly relevant for contexts that use RPE as a tool for training load prescription.

The Impact of Limited Previous Motor Experience on Action Possibility Judgments in People with Spinal Muscle Atrophy

Previous studies have shown that people with limited motor capabilities may rely on previous motor experience when making action possibility judgments for others. In the present study, we examined if having limited previous motor experience, as a consequence of spinal muscle atrophy (SMA), alters action possibility judgments. Participants with SMA and neurologically healthy (NH) sex- and age-matched controls performed a perceptual-motor judgment task using the Fitts's law paradigm. Participants observed apparent motion videos of reciprocal aiming movements with varying levels of difficulty. For each movement, participants predicted the shortest movement time (MT) at which a neurologically healthy young adult could accurately perform the task. Participants with SMA predicted significantly longer MTs compared to controls; however, the predicted MTs of both SMA and NH participants exhibited a Fitts's law relationship (i.e., the predicted MTs significantly increased as movement difficulty increased). Overall, these results provide evidence that participants with SMA who have limited, or no motor experience may make more conservative action possibility judgments for others. Critically, our finding that the pattern of action possibility judgments was not different between SMA and NH groups suggests that limited previous motor experience may not completely impair action possibility judgments.

Curiosity as a metacognitive feeling

Curious information-seeking is known to be a key driver for learning, but characterizing this important psychological phenomenon remains a challenge. In this article, we argue that solving this challenge requires qualifying the relationships between metacognition and curiosity. The idea that curiosity is a metacognitive competence has been resisted: researchers have assumed both that young children and non-human animals can be genuinely curious, and that metacognition requires conceptual and culturally situated resources that are unavailable to young children and non-human animals. Here, we argue that this resistance is unwarranted given accumulating evidence that metacognition can be deployed procedurally, and we defend the view that curiosity is a metacognitive feeling. Our metacognitive view singles out two monitoring steps as a triggering condition for curiosity: evaluating one's own informational needs, and predicting the likelihood that explorations of the proximate environment afford significant information gains. We review empirical evidence and computational models of curiosity, and show that they fit well with this metacognitive account, while on the contrary, they remain difficult to explain by a competing account according to which curiosity is a basic attitude of questioning. Finally, we propose a new way to construe the relationships between curiosity and the human-specific communicative practice of questioning, discuss the issue of how children may learn to express their curiosity through interactions with others, and conclude by briefly exploring the implications of our proposal for educational practices.