Psychophysiology, 2018, 55, S37. [Paper presented at the 58^th Annual Meeting of the Society of Psychophysiological Research (SPR) in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada, October 3-7, 2018.]

Sustained negative slow wave and mid-frontal theta oscillations as measures of attention and cognitive control during auditory working memory (WM): dissociation of Ignore vs Suppress vs Remember tasks.

Jürgen Kayser^a,b, Craig E. Tenke^a,b, Lidia Y.X. Wong^a, Lindsey Casal-Roscum^a, Jorge E. Alvarenga^a, Kenneth Hugdahl^c, John Jonides^d, Gerard E. Bruder^a,b

^aNew York State Psychiatric Institute, Departments of Cognitive Neuroscience and Translational Epidemiology, New York, NY, USA; ^bColumbia University, Department of Psychiatry, New York, NY, USA; ^cUniversity of Bergen, Department of Biological and Medical Psychology, Bergen, Norway; ^dUniversity of Michigan, Department of Psychology, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Abstract

We developed auditory analogs of visual Ignore/Suppress tasks to dissect the role of perceptual “bottom-up” and “top-down” attention or inhibitory control processes in WM that may underlie cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia. ERPs (72 sites) were recorded from 31 healthy adults during encoding, maintenance, and item retrieval in 3 tasks (I: Ignore; S: Suppress; R: Remember) consisting of listening to a series of 4 letters alternately presented to each ear (0.6-s SOA), followed by a 3-s maintenance interval and a probe. Subjects selectively attended to letters presented to one ear and ignored those in the other ear (I), suppressed letters presented to one ear (S), or remembered all letters (R). The critical cue was provided either before (I) or after (S) the encoding series, or with the probe (R). Here we focus on ERPs and event-related oscillations (EROs) over the entire 10-s trial interval after reference-free scalp current source density (CSD) transformation. A broad sustained negative slow wave (NSW) was greater for I than S and R during encoding but greater for S than I and R during maintenance. A time-frequency analysis of these data revealed distinct task-specific modulations of prominent mid-frontal theta (MFT) paralleling the NSW effects. Most importantly, MFT was selectively enhanced for S compared to I and R during maintenance (i.e., not due to task difficulty or source memory requirements). These findings, which were effectively replicated after 1-wk retest, strongly implicate MFT as an electrophysiological correlate of inhibition of information stored in WM.

Key Words: auditory WM; mid-frontal theta; cognitive control

[Supported by NIMH grant MH106905].