Comparing verbal working memory load in auditory and visual modalities using functional near-infrared spectroscopy
Autor: | Frank A. Russo, Huiwen Goy, Rebecca Nurgitz, Joseph Rovetti |
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Rok vydání: | 2020 |
Předmět: |
Adult
medicine.medical_specialty Visual perception genetic structures Adolescent media_common.quotation_subject Audiology 03 medical and health sciences Behavioral Neuroscience Young Adult 0302 clinical medicine Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex Neuroimaging medicine Contrast (vision) Humans 10. No inequality Prefrontal cortex 030304 developmental biology media_common 0303 health sciences Modality (human–computer interaction) Spectroscopy Near-Infrared medicine.diagnostic_test Working memory Functional Neuroimaging Memory Short-Term Pattern Recognition Visual Reading Speech Perception Functional near-infrared spectroscopy Psychology Functional magnetic resonance imaging 030217 neurology & neurosurgery Psychomotor Performance |
Zdroj: | Behavioural brain research. 402 |
ISSN: | 1872-7549 |
Popis: | The verbal identity n-back task is commonly used to assess verbal working memory (VWM) capacity. Only three studies have compared brain activation during the n-back when using auditory and visual stimuli. The earliest study, a positron emission tomography study of the 3-back, found no differences in VWM-related brain activation between n-back modalities. In contrast, two subsequent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of the 2-back found that auditory VWM was associated with greater left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DL-PFC) activation than visual VWM, perhaps suggesting that auditory VWM requires more cognitive effort than its visual counterpart. The current study aimed to assess whether DL-PFC activation (i.e., cognitive effort) differs by VWM modality. To do this, 16 younger adults completed an auditory and visual n-back, both at four levels of VWM load. Concurrently, activation of the PFC was measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), a silent neuroimaging method. We found that DL-PFC activation increased with VWM load, but it was not affected by VWM modality or the interaction between load and modality. This supports the view that both VWM modalities require similar cognitive effort, and perhaps that previous fMRI results were an artefact of scanner noise. We also found that, across conditions, DL-PFC activation was positively correlated with reaction time. This may further support DL-PFC activation as an index of cognitive effort, and fNIRS as a method to measure it. |
Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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