Correlating Gray Matter Volume with Individual Difference in the Flanker Interference Effect.

The Eriksen Flanker task has been widely used as a measurement of cognitive control, however till now information is still scarce about how the neuroanatomical properties are related to performance in this task. Using voxel-based morphometry technique (VBM), the current study identified a set of dis...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Changming Chen, Jiemin Yang, Jiayu Lai, Hong Li, Jiajin Yuan, Najam ul Hasan Abbasi
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2015-01-01
Series:PLoS ONE
Online Access:http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC4554993?pdf=render
Description
Summary:The Eriksen Flanker task has been widely used as a measurement of cognitive control, however till now information is still scarce about how the neuroanatomical properties are related to performance in this task. Using voxel-based morphometry technique (VBM), the current study identified a set of distributed areas where the gray matter volume (GM) correlated positively with participants' efficiency in interference inhibition. These areas included the bilateral prefrontal gyri, left insula and inferior temporal gyrus, the left inferior parietal lobule. Further analysis using a novel machine learning algorithm with balanced cross-validation procedure confirmed that in these areas the GM-behavioral association was unlikely a byproduct of outlier values, instead, the gray matter volume could predict reliably participants' interference inhibition efficiency. These results underscore the importance of the fronto-parietal and insula systems to the brain functioning of interference inhibition from the neuroanatomical perspective.
ISSN:1932-6203