title: Frontal and occipital-parietal alpha oscillations distinguish between stimulus conflict and response conflict.
abstract: Conflicts between target and distraction can occur at the level of both stimulus and response processing. However, the neural oscillations underlying occurrence of the interference in different levels have not been understood well. Here, we reveal such a neural oscillation modulation by combining a 4:2 mapping design (two targets are mapped into one response key) with a practice paradigm (pretest, practice, and posttest) when healthy human participants were performing a novel color-word flanker task. Response time (RT) results revealed constant stimulus conflict (SC, stimulus incongruent minus congruent, SI-CO) but increased response conflict (RC, response incongruent minus stimulus incongruent, RI-SI) with practice. Event-related potential (ERP) results demonstrated stable P3 amplitude differences for the SI-CO in the centro-parietal region across practice, which may reflect maintenance of the stimulus processing; and significantly larger P3 amplitudes in the same region for the RI relative to SI trial type in posttest, which may reflect inhibition of the distraction response. Further, neural oscillatory results showed that with practice, the lower alpha band in the frontal region and the upper alpha band in the occipital-parietal region distinguished between stimulus- and response-conflicts, respectively, suggesting that practice reduces the alertness (sensitiveness) of the brain to conflict occurrence, and enhances stimulus-response associations.
authors: School of Education Science, Zunyi Normal College Zunyi, China ; Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality (Ministry of Education) and School of Psychology, Southwest University Chongqing, China.
authors: Dandan
authors: D
authors: Tang
authors: Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality (Ministry of Education) and School of Psychology, Southwest University Chongqing, China.
authors: Li
authors: L
authors: Hu
authors: Research Centre for Brain Function and Psychological Science, Shenzhen University Shenzhen, China.
authors: Yi
authors: Y
authors: Lei
authors: Research Centre for Brain Function and Psychological Science, Shenzhen University Shenzhen, China.
authors: Hong
authors: H
authors: Li
authors: Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality (Ministry of Education) and School of Psychology, Southwest University Chongqing, China.
authors: Antao
authors: A
authors: Chen
keywords: alpha band; event-related potential (ERP); flanker task; neural oscillation; practice paradigm