Abstract
Recent research has found that the traditional target P3 consists of a family of P3-like positivities that can be functionally and topographically dissociated from one another. The current study examined target N2 and P3-like subcomponents indexing conflict detection and context updating at low- and high-order levels in the neural hierarchy during cognitive control. Electroencephalographic signals were recorded from 45 young adults while they completed a hybrid go/nogo flanker task, and Residue Iteration Decomposition (RIDE) was applied to functionally dissociate these peaks. Analyses showed a stimulus-locked frontal N2 revealing early detection and fast perceptual categorization of nogo, congruent and incongruent trials, resulting in frontal P3-like activity elicited by nogo trials in the latency-variable RIDE cluster, and by incongruent trials in the response-locked cluster. The congruent trials did not elicit frontal P3-like activity. These findings suggest that behavioral incongruency effects are related to intermediate and later stages of motor response re-programming.
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The research was funded by the School of Psychological Science at the University of Western Australia. Funding support was provided for by an Australian Postgraduate Award scholarship for Christopher Brydges. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
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Brydges, C.R., Barceló, F., Nguyen, A.T. et al. Fast fronto-parietal cortical dynamics of conflict detection and context updating in a flanker task. Cogn Neurodyn 14, 795–814 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-020-09628-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-020-09628-z