UNASSIGNED: To examine the manifestation of cognitive control deficit of children with different levels of hyperactivity, an \"at risk\" dimension for ADHD.
UNASSIGNED: A group of children with high hyperactivity (N = 40) and another group of children with low levels of hyperactivity (N = 38) performed a modified stop-signal anticipation task, a revised Go/NoGo task, and the AX-continuous performance test (AX-CPT).
UNASSIGNED: Children with higher levels of hyperactivity displayed: (1) significantly prolonged stop signal reaction time (SSRT) in the modified stop-signal anticipation task; (2) no notable differences in commission errors in the revised Go/NoGo task; (3) increased reaction time (RT) in stop-signal task and Go/NoGo task with increased probabilities of stop or NoGo signal; and (4) positive proactive behavioral index scores in AX-CPT.
UNASSIGNED: The results suggested that children with heightened hyperactivity exhibited impaired reactive control, especially for responses already underway, but preserved proactive control. Further studies concerning these children are warranted.

UNASSIGNED: The purpose of this study was to examine differences between directly measured and parent-evaluated executive function in predicting children\'s academic achievement and social development, and to explore the mediating roles of peer status and social competence in the effects of executive function on social behavior.
UNASSIGNED: The study followed 106 first-grade children in an elementary school in China for one year. Regression and mediation analyses were conducted using SPSS 26.0 and AMOS 21.0 to test the hypotheses.
UNASSIGNED: First, in a comparison of the predictive role of directly measured and parent-evaluated executive function, directly measured executive function played a more important role in predicting academic achievement, while parent-evaluated executive function played a greater role in predicting social development. Second, parent-evaluated executive function influenced social behavior primarily through social competence and peer status, with social competence playing a more significant mediating role than peer status.
UNASSIGNED: Compared with previous studies, the results of the present study provide more direct evidence for the relationship and differences between directly measured and parent-evaluated executive function, further suggesting that they have different efficacy and predictive goals, while the present study also describes the pathways through which executive function influences social behavior: the mediating role of peer status and social competence. This suggests that, on the one hand, educators or researchers need to choose appropriate measures of executive function for their own purposes and, on the other hand, in order to promote the development of children\'s social behavior, they need to focus on the development of children\'s executive function, social competence and peer relationships.

BACKGROUND: Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) involves an imbalance in the brain\'s dual-system, characterized by heightened reward-seeking and diminished cognitive control, which leads to decision-making challenges. The exploration-exploitation strategy is key to decision-making, but how IGD affects this process is unclear.
METHODS: To investigate the impact of IGD on decision-making, a modified version of the two-armed bandit task was employed. Participants included 41 IGD individuals and 44 healthy control (HC) individuals. The study assessed the strategies used by participants in the task, particularly focusing on the exploitation-exploration strategy. Additionally, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to examine brain activation patterns during decision-making and estimation phasess.
RESULTS: The study found that individuals with IGD demonstrated a higher reliance on exploitative strategies in decision-making due to their elevated value-seeking tendencies and decreased cognitive control. IGD individuals also displayed heightened activation in the pre-supplementary motor area (preSMA) and the ventral striatum (VS) compared to the HC group in both decision-making and estimation phases. Meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex (PFC) showed more inhibition in IGD individuals than in the HC group during exploitative strategies. This inhibition was found to decrease as cognitive control diminished.
CONCLUSIONS: The study concludes that the imbalance in the development of the dual-system in individuals with IGD may lead to an over-reliance on exploitative strategies. This imbalance, marked by increased reward-seeking and reduced cognitive control, contributes to difficulties in decision-making and value-related behavioral processes in IGD individuals.

Mental subtraction, involving numerical processing and operation, requires a complex interplay among several brain regions. Diverse studies have utilized scalp electroencephalograph, electrocorticogram, or functional magnetic resonance imaging to resolve the structure pattern and functional activity during subtraction operation. However, a high resolution of the spatial-temporal understanding of the neural mechanisms involved in mental subtraction is unavailable. Thus, this study obtained intracranial stereoelectroencephalography recordings from 20 patients with pharmacologically resistant epilepsy. Specifically, two sample-delayed mismatch paradigms of numeric comparison and subtracting results comparison were used to help reveal the time frame of mental subtraction. The brain sub-regions were chronologically screened using the stereoelectroencephalography recording for mental subtraction. The results indicated that the anterior cortex, containing the frontal, insular, and parahippocampous, worked for preparing for mental subtraction; moreover, the posterior cortex, such as parietal, occipital, limbic, and temporal regions, cooperated during subtraction. Especially, the gamma band activities in core regions within the parietal-cingulate-temporal cortices mediated the critical mental subtraction. Overall, this research is the first to describe the spatiotemporal activities underlying mental subtraction in the human brain. It provides a comprehensive insight into the cognitive control activity underlying mental arithmetic.
UNASSIGNED: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11571-023-09937-z.

The link between cognitive function and emotion regulation may be helpful in better understanding the onset, maintenance, and treatment for depression. However, it remains unclear whether there are neural correlates between emotion dysregulation and cognitive deficits in depression. To address this question, we first review the neural representations of emotion dysregulation and cognitive deficits in depression (including deficits in cognitive control and cognitive biases). Based on the comparisons of neural representations of emotion dysregulation versus cognitive deficits, we propose an accessible and reasonable link between emotion dysregulation, cognitive control, and cognitive biases in depression. Specifically, cognitive control serves the whole process of emotion regulation, whereas cognitive biases are engaged in emotion regulation processes at different stages. Moreover, the abnormal implementation of different emotion regulation strategies in depression is consistently affected by cognitive control, which is involved in the dorsolateral, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and the anterior cingulate cortex. Besides, the relationship between different emotion regulation strategies and cognitive biases in depression may be distinct: the orbitofrontal cortex contributes to the association between ineffective reappraisal and negative interpretation bias, while the subgenual prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex underline the tendency of depressed individuals to ruminate and overly engage in self-referential bias. This review sheds light on the relationship between cognitive deficits and emotion dysregulation in depression and identifies directions in need of future attention.

Previous studies have shown that alertness is closely related to executive control function, but its impact on components of post-error adjustment is unknown. This study applied the Attentional Networks Test and the Four-choice Flanker task with three response stimulus intervals (RSIs) to explore the correlation between alertness and post-error adjustment. The linear mixed-effects model of alertness and RSI on the post-error processing indicators showed a significant negative correlation between the alertness and post-error slowing (PES) under 200 ms RSI , as well as between alertness and post-error improvement in accuracy (PIA) under both 700 ms RSI and 1200 ms RSI. Participants with lower alertness showed larger post-error slowing in the early stages, while those with higher alertness had smaller PIA in later stages. This study revealed the effects of alertness on different processing components of post-error adjustment. The control strategies utilized by individuals with high and low levels of alertness differed in preparation for performance monitoring. Alertness improved post-error response speed in a task-unspecific manner, but not post-error adaptation.

Information stored in working memory can guide perception selection, and this process is modulated by cognitive control. Although previous studies have demonstrated that neurostimulation over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (lDLPFC) contributes to restore cognitive control among individuals with substance use disorder (SUD), there remains an open question about the potential stimulation effects on memory-driven attention. To address this issue, the present study adopted a combined working memory/attention paradigm while employing high-definition transcranial direct current stimulation (HD-tDCS) to stimulate the lDLPFC. Observers were asked to maintain visual or audiovisual information in memory while executing a search task, while the validity of the memory contents for the subsequent search task could be either invalid or neutral. The results showed a faint memory-driven attentional suppression effect in sham stimulation only under the audiovisual condition. Moreover, anodal HD-tDCS facilitated attentional suppression effect in both the strength and temporal dynamics under the visual-only condition, whereas the effect was impaired or unchanged under the audiovisual condition. Surprisingly, cathodal HD-tDCS selectively improved temporal dynamics of the attentional suppression effect under the audiovisual condition. The present study revealed the differential enhancement of HD-tDCS on cognitive control over visual and audiovisual memory-driven attention among individuals with SUD.

The ability to find the right balance between more persistent and more flexible cognitive-control styles is known as \"metacontrol.\" Recent findings suggest a relevance of aperiodic EEG activity and task conditions that are likely to elicit a specific metacontrol style. Here we investigated whether individual differences in aperiodic EEG activity obtained off-task (during resting state) predict individual cognitive-control styles under task conditions that pose different demands on metacontrol. We analyzed EEG resting-state data, task-EEG, and behavioral outcomes from a sample of N = 65 healthy participants performing a Go/Nogo task. We examined aperiodic activity as indicator of \"neural noise\" in the EEG power spectrum, and participants were assigned to a high-noise or low-noise group according to a median split of the exponents obtained for resting state. We found that off-task aperiodic exponents predicted different cognitive-control styles in Go and Nogo conditions: Overall, aperiodic exponents were higher (i.e., noise was lower) in the low-noise group, who however showed no difference between Go and Nogo trials, whereas the high-noise group exhibited significant noise reduction in the more persistence-heavy Nogo condition. This suggests that trait-like biases determine the default cognitive-control style, which however can be overwritten or compensated for under challenging task demands. We suggest that aperiodic activity in EEG signals represents valid indicators of highly dynamic arbitration between metacontrol styles, representing the brain\'s capability to reorganize itself and adapt its neural activity patterns to changing environmental conditions.

This study investigated the role of cognitive control in moral decision-making, focusing on conflicts between financial temptations and the integrity of honesty. We employed a perceptual task by asking participants to identify which side of the diagonal contained more red dots within a square to provoke both honest and dishonest behaviors, tracking their reaction times (RTs). Participants encountered situations with no conflict, ambiguous conflict, and clear conflict. Their behaviors in the clear conflict condition categorized them as either \"honest\" or \"dishonest.\" Our findings suggested that, in ambiguous conflict situations, honest individuals had significantly longer RTs and fewer self-interest responses than their dishonest counterparts, suggesting a greater need for cognitive control to resolve conflicts and a lesser tendency toward self-interest. Moreover, a negative correlation was found between participants\' number of self-interest responses and RTs in ambiguous conflict situations (r = -0.27 in study 1 and r = -0.66 in study 2), and a positive correlation with cheating numbers in clear conflict situations (r = 0.36 in study 1 and r = 0.82 in study 2). This suggests less cognitive control was required for self-interest and cheating responses, bolstering the \"Will\" hypothesis. We also found that a person\'s self-interest tendency could predict their dishonest behavior. These insights extend our understanding of the role of cognitive control plays in honesty and dishonesty, with potential applications in education, policy-making, and business ethics.

Task switching refers to a set of cognitive processes involved in shifting attention from one task to another. In recent years, researchers have applied transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to investigate the causal relationship between the parietal cortex and task switching. However, results from available studies are highly inconsistent. This may be due to the unclear understanding of the underlying mechanisms. Therefore, the current study utilized event-related potential (ERP) analysis to investigate the modulatory effects of tDCS on task-switching processes. Twenty-four subjects were recruited to perform both predictable and unpredictable parity/magnitude tasks under anodal (RA) and sham conditions. The results showed no significant changes in behavioral performance. However, marked tDCS-induced ERP changes were observed. Specifically, for the predictable task switching, compared with the sham condition, the target-N2 component occurred significantly earlier for switch trials than repeat trials under the RA condition in males, while no difference was found in females. For unpredictable task switching, under the sham condition, the P2 peak was significantly larger for switch trials compared with repeat trials, whereas this difference was not observed under the RA condition. These results indicated the causal relationship between the right parietal cortex and exogenous adjustment processes involved in task switching. Moreover, anodal tDCS over the right parietal cortex may lead to the manifestation of gender differences.