Behavioral measures of attention and cognitive control during a new auditory working memory paradigm.

Content Provider	Europe PMC
Author	Kayser, Jürgen Wong, Lidia Y. X. Sacchi, Elizabeth Casal-Roscum, Lindsey Alvarenga, Jorge E. Hugdahl, Kenneth Bruder, Gerard E. Jonides, John
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 (“valid”) or the ignored/suppressed ear (“lure”), or were not presented (“control”). 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 from WM. The paradigm-related internal consistencies and 1-week test–retest reliabilities (n = 38) were good to excellent. Our findings validate these auditory WM tasks as a reliable manipulation of proactive control and set the stage for studies with schizophrenia patients who experience auditory hallucinations.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.3758/s13428-019-01308-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Related Links	https://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC7266708&blobtype=pdf
ISSN	1554351X
Journal	Behavior Research Methods [Behav Res Methods]
Volume Number	52
DOI	10.3758/s13428-019-01308-z
PubMed Central reference number	PMC7266708
Issue Number	3
PubMed reference number	31797177
e-ISSN	15543528
Language	English
Publisher	Springer US
Publisher Date	2020-06-01
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	Open
Rights License	Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. © The Author(s) 2019
Subject Keyword	Attention Auditory modality Proactive control Test–retest reliability Working memory
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Experimental and Cognitive Psychology Arts and Humanities Developmental and Educational Psychology Psychology