Behavioral measures of attention and cognitive control during a new auditory working memory paradigm
Jürgen Kayser1,2,3, Lidia Y.X. Wong1,2,3Â, Elizabeth Sacchi3, Lindsey Casal-Roscum1, Jorge E. Alvarenga1, Kennneth Hugdahl4,5,6, Gerard E. Bruder2, John Jonides7
1Division of Cognitive Neuroscience, New York State Psychiatric Institute, New York, NY, USA; 2Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, NY, USA; 3Division of Translational Epidemiology, New York State Psychiatric Institute, New York, NY, USA; 4Department of Biological and Medical Psychology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway; 5Division of Psychiatry, Haukeland University Hospital, Bergen, Norway; 6Department of Radiology, Haukeland University Hospital, Bergen, Norway; 7Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Received 27 November 2018; revised 1 August 2019; accepted 9 September 2019; published onine 3 December 2019.
Abstract
Proactive control is the ability to manipulate and maintain goal-relevant information within working memory (WM), allowing individuals to selectively attend to important information while inhibiting irrelevant distractions. Deficits in proactive control may cause multiple cognitive impairments seen in schizophrenia. However, studies of cognitive control have largely relied on visual tasks, even though the functional deficits in schizophrenia are more frequent and severe in the auditory domain (i.e., hallucinations). Hence, we developed an auditory analogue of a visual ignore/suppress paradigm. Healthy adults (N = 40) listened to a series of four letters (600-ms stimulus onset asynchrony) presented alternately to each ear, followed by a 3.2-s maintenance interval and a probe. Participants were directed either to selectively ignore (I) the to-be-presented letters at one ear, to suppress (S) letters already presented to one ear, or to remember (R) all presented letters. The critical cue was provided either before (I) or after (S) the encoding series, or simultaneously with the probe (R). The probes were encoding items presented to either the attended/not suppressed ear (ÂvalidÂ) or the ignored/suppressed ear (ÂlureÂ), or were not presented (ÂcontrolÂ). Replicating prior findings during visual ignore/suppress tasks, response sensitivity and latency revealed poorer performance for lure than for control trials, particularly during the suppress condition. Shorter suppress than remember latencies suggested a behavioral advantage when discarding encoded items fromWM. The paradigm-related internal consistencies and 1-week testÂretest reliabilities (n = 38) were good to excellent. Our findings validate these auditoryWMtasks as a reliable manipulation of proactive control and set the stage for studies with schizophrenia patients who experience auditory hallucinations.
Key Words: Attention; Auditory modality; Proactive control; TestÂretest reliability; Workingmemory