Abstract
Pavlov proposed the theory of higher nervous activity, and divided the neural types of humans and animals into four types. Different types of individuals have different behavioral performances and cognitive processing characteristics. At present, most of the researches on neural types and attention are behavioral experiments, the neural mechanisms of the differences in attention processing of different neural types is not clear. Therefore, this study focuses on the neural mechanism of attention processing of different neural types by using event-related potentials technique (ERPs).
Before the normal experiments, 1263 college students were tested using 80.8 Neural Type Test Scale, each 15 students for flexible type, quiet type, excitatory type and inhibitory type were randomly selected from the subjects(a student of flexible type did not complete all the experimental tasks) .The 59 subjects engaged and finished 3 tasks, the first was the alerting task, the second was orienting task, and the last was executive control task, the behavioral data and ERP data in 3 tasks were recorded and analyzed.
Behavioral results showed that: 1) in alerting task, the main effect of cues was significant(p < .001) , the reaction time under neutral cue condition was significantly faster than no cue condition, there was no significant difference in the alerting effect between the four groups(RTno cue – RTdouble cue); 2) in orienting task, the reaction time under valid cue conditions was faster than invalid cue(p < .001), there was no significant difference in orienting effect between the four groups(RTinvalid cue – RTvalid cue); 3) in executive control task, the response was significantly faster under the condition of consistent cues than that of inconsistent cues (p < .001), there was no significant difference in executive control effect(RTdifficulty cue – RT simple cue) between the four groups either. The ERP results showed that: 1) the N1 amplitudes of quiet type subjects in alerting processing were significantly higher than excitatory type and inhibitory type subjects, and orienting processing were significantly higher than that of the other three types; 2) The difficulty effect size (the N2 difference between difficulty and simple situations) of N2 in executive control processing was significant bigger in the flexible type than the other types; 3) There was no significant difference in the difficulty effect size(the P3 difference between difficulty and simple situations) of P3 amplitude between neural types, however, P3 amplitude of excitatory type was bigger than inhibitory type.
In conclusion, the present study found that there were no significant differences between subjects with different neural types in the alerting, orienting and executive control effects of attention. For the ERP results, 1) quiet type subjects were more alert to non-oriented stimulation of space, and better directed attention toward unilateral spatial cues; 2) the difficulty effect size of N2 amplitude between quiet type and other types suggested that the flexible types had stronger conflict detection efficiency, flexible subjects were faster in conflict detection than other neural types; 3)there was no different in the difficulty effect size (the P3 difference between difficulty and simple situations) of p3 indicated that there was no difference in conflict resolution between four types, P3 amplitude of excitatory type was bigger than inhibitory type meant that the inhibitory type may recruit more cognitive resources to solve conflict inference relative to the excitatory type.
Key words
neural types /
attention network /
alerting /
orienting /
executive control
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Xin-Guang SHI.
The Differences and Neural Mechanisms of the Attention Network of Different Neural Types[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2022, 45(2): 258-267
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