Learned switch readiness via concurrent activation of task sets: Evidence from task specificity and memory load.

Cognitive flexibility increases when switch demands increase. In task switching experiments, repeated pairing of flexibility-demanding situations with specific contexts leads subjects to become more prepared to adapt to changing task demands in those contexts. One form of such upregulated cognitive flexibility has been demonstrated with a list-wide switch probability (LWSP) effect, where switch costs are smaller in lists with frequent switches than in lists with rare switches.

Nurses' Psychological Trauma and Cognitive Control in the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Introduction: During the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses have faced various nurse-specific traumas in their workplaces, but there is limited understanding of the resulting outcomes and factors that contribute to them.

Objective: To address this gap, the study employed the middle-range theory of nurses' psychological trauma (NPT) to examine these relationships among frontline nurses working in critical care areas.

Methods: In a quantitative cross-sectional study, the study compared nurses identified as probable cases of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with those identified as not probable cases.

Well under control: Control demand changes are sufficient for metacontrol.

Metacontrol arises from the efficient retrieval of cognitive control by environmental cues that are predictive of the upcoming control demands. Previous studies have demonstrated that proactive and reactive metacontrol can be indexed by a list-wide switch probability (LWSP) and an item-specific switch probability (ISSP) effect, respectively. However, what triggers metacontrol in the first place has not been clearly articulated.

Task foreknowledge swallows item-specific but not list-wide control learning effects.

Recent context-control learning studies have shown that switch costs are reduced in a particular context predicting a high probability of switching as compared to another context predicting a low probability of switching. These context-specific switch probability effects suggest that control of task sets, through experience, can become associated with a particular context cue and be retrieved subsequently to modulate task-switching efficiency. However, advanced task foreknowledge, mediated by top-down retrieval of a specific task set, also modulates switch costs, as shown in the task-switching literature.

Impact of a Clinical Decision Support System on Inappropriate Prescription of Glucose-lowering Agents for Patients With Renal Insufficiency in an Ambulatory Care Setting.

Purpose: Inappropriate dosing of glucose-lowering drugs in patients with renal insufficiency can cause severe harm. This study evaluated the short- and long-term effects of clinical decision support systems (CDSS) on inappropriate prescriptions of glucose-lowering agents for patients with renal insufficiency in an ambulatory care setting.

Methods: This retrospective longitudinal observational study was conducted by using an electronic medical record database and the CDSS log data at Taipei Veterans General Hospital between January 1, 2015, and December 31, 2018.

Hemisphere-specific Parietal Contributions to the Interplay between Working Memory and Attention.

To achieve our moment-to-moment goals, we must often keep information temporarily in mind. Yet, this working memory (WM) may compete with demands for our attention in the environment. Attentional and WM functions are thought to operate by similar underlying principles, and they often engage overlapping fronto-parietal brain regions.

Independent subsequent memory effects of conflict resolution and response inhibition.

Learning and memory are an integral part of life, yet we often take them for granted. We remember what we have learned. However, the relationship between learning and memory may not be as simple as it seems.

Voices from the COVID-19 frontline: Nurses' trauma and coping.

Aim: To describe the experiences of frontline nurses who are working in critical care areas during the COVID-19 pandemic with a focus on trauma and the use of substances as a coping mechanism.

Design: A qualitative study based on content analysis.

Methods: Data were collected from mid-June 2020 to early September 2020 via an online survey.

Proactive and reactive metacontrol in task switching.

While cognitive control enables the selection of goal-relevant responses, metacontrol enables the selection of context-appropriate control operations. In task switching, metacontrol modulates task-switching efficiency by retrieving the associations between a contextual cue and a particular cognitive control demand. While the automatic retrieval of cognitive control is appealing due to its time and energy efficiency, the effects of different contextual cues have been shown in separate studies and appear to have different characteristics.

Item-specific priming of voluntary task switches.

The ability to switch efficiently between different tasks underpins cognitive flexibility and is impaired in various psychiatric disorders. Recent research has suggested that the control processes mediating switching can be subject to learning, because "switch readiness" can become associated with, and primed by, specific stimuli. In cued task switching, items that are frequently associated with the need to switch incur a smaller behavioral switch cost than do items associated with a low probability of switching, known as the item-specific switch probability (ISSP) effect (Chiu & Egner, 2017).

Cortical and subcortical contributions to context-control learning.

"Cognitive control" describes our ability to strategically bias information processing in line with internal goals. Traditionally, research has focused on delineating the sources of top-down biasing, implicating the lateral prefrontal cortex. The past two decades, however, have seen increasing interest in the regulation of control, that is, how learning processes guide the context-sensitive application of top-down biasing.

Automatic Prioritization of Self-Referential Stimuli in Working Memory.

People preferentially attend to external stimuli that are related to themselves compared with others. Whether a similar self-reference bias applies to internal representations, such as those maintained in working memory (WM), is presently unknown. We tested this possibility in four experiments, in which participants were first trained to associate social labels (self, friend, stranger) with arbitrary colors and then performed a delayed match-to-sample spatial WM task on color locations.

Cueing cognitive flexibility: Item-specific learning of switch readiness.

The rich behavioral repertoire of the human species derives from our ability to flexibly reconfigure processing strategies (task sets) in response to changing requirements. This updating of task sets is effortful, as reflected by longer response times when switching a task than repeating it (switch costs). However, some recent data suggest that switch costs can be reduced by cueing switch readiness bottom-up, by associating particular stimuli with frequent switch requirements.

The Caudate Nucleus Mediates Learning of Stimulus-Control State Associations.

Unlabelled: A longstanding dichotomy in cognitive psychology and neuroscience pits controlled, top-down driven behavior against associative, bottom-up driven behavior, where cognitive control processes allow us to override well-learned stimulus-response (S-R) associations. By contrast, some previous studies have raised the intriguing possibility of an integration between associative and controlled processing in the form of stimulus-control state (S-C) associations, the learned linkage of specific stimuli to particular control states, such as high attentional selectivity. The neural machinery mediating S-C learning remains poorly understood, however.

Tracking the will to attend: Cortical activity indexes self-generated, voluntary shifts of attention.

The neural substrates of volition have long tantalized philosophers and scientists. Over the past few decades, researchers have employed increasingly sophisticated technology to investigate this issue, but many studies have been limited considerably by their reliance on intrusive experimental procedures (e.g.

Distractor-relevance determines whether task-switching enhances or impairs distractor memory.

Richter and Yeung (2012) recently documented a novel task-switching effect, a switch-induced reduction in "memory selectivity," characterized by relatively enhanced memory for distractor stimuli and impaired memory for target stimuli encountered on switch trials compared with repeat trials. One interpretation of this finding argues that task-switching involves opening a "gate" to working memory, which promotes updating of the task-set, but at the same time allows for increased distraction from task-irrelevant information. However, in that study, the distractor category on a switch trial also represented the task-relevant target category from the previous trial.

Inhibition-Induced Forgetting Results from Resource Competition between Response Inhibition and Memory Encoding Processes.

Unlabelled: Response inhibition is a key component of executive control, but its relation to other cognitive processes is not well understood. We recently documented the "inhibition-induced forgetting effect": no-go cues are remembered more poorly than go cues. We attributed this effect to central-resource competition, whereby response inhibition saps attention away from memory encoding.

Inhibition-induced forgetting: when more control leads to less memory.

The ability to inhibit prepotent responses is a core executive function, but the relation of response inhibition to other cognitive operations is poorly understood. In the study reported here, we examined inhibitory control through the lens of incidental memory. Participants categorized face stimuli by gender in a go/no-go task (Experiments 1 and 2) or a stop-signal task (Experiment 3) and, after a short delay, performed a surprise recognition memory task for those faces.

Intracellular delivery of recombinant arginine deiminase (rADI) by heparin-binding hemagglutinin adhesion peptide restores sensitivity in rADI-resistant cancer cells.

Recombinant arginine deiminase (rADI) has been used in clinical trials for arginine-auxotrophic cancers. However, the emergence of rADI resistance, due to the overexpression of argininosuccinate synthetase (AS), has introduced an obstacle in its clinical application. Here, we have proposed a strategy for the intracellular delivery of rADI, which depletes both extracellular and intracellular arginine, to restore the sensitivity of rADI-resistant cancer cells.

Opposing effects of appetitive and aversive cues on go/no-go behavior and motor excitability.

Everyday life, as well as psychiatric illness, is replete with examples where appetitive and aversive stimuli hijack the will, leading to maladaptive behavior. Yet the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are not well understood. Here we investigate how motivational cues influence action tendencies in healthy individuals with a novel paradigm.

Unconsciously triggered response inhibition requires an executive setting.

Much research on response inhibition has focused on a consciously triggered variety (i.e., outright stopping of action).

Response suppression by automatic retrieval of stimulus-stop association: evidence from transcranial magnetic stimulation.

Behavioral studies show that subjects respond more slowly to stimuli to which they previously stopped. This response slowing could be explained by "automatic inhibition" (i.e.

Visuotopic cortical connectivity underlying attention revealed with white-matter tractography.

Visual attention selects behaviorally relevant information for detailed processing by resolving competition for representation among stimuli in retinotopically organized visual cortex. The signals that control this attentional biasing are thought to arise in a frontoparietal network of several brain regions, including posterior parietal cortex. Recent studies have revealed a topographic organization in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) that mirrors the retinotopic organization in visual cortex, suggesting that connectivity between these regions might provide the mechanism by which attention acts on early cortical representations.

Tracking cognitive fluctuations with multivoxel pattern time course (MVPTC) analysis.

The posterior parietal cortex, including the medial superior parietal lobule (mSPL), becomes transiently more active during acts of cognitive control in a wide range of domains, including shifts of spatial and nonspatial visual attention, shifts between working memory representations, and shifts between categorization rules. Furthermore, spatial patterns of activity within mSPL, identified using multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA), reliably distinguish between different acts of control. Here we describe a novel multivoxel pattern-based analysis that uses fluctuations in cognitive state over time to reveal inter-regional functional connectivity.