Cognitive Control & the Functional Organization of the Frontal Cortex

Study Summary

The goal of this basic experimental clinical trial is to understand the effect of multitasking practice on the structure of neural representations of tasks in the human lateral prefrontal cortex and control brain regions. The main question it aims to answer is: What changes in neural representational structure predict improvements in multitasking behavior due to multitasking practice? Healthy human participants will learn two independent tasks, each mapping a set of stimuli to motor responses based on different rules. Participants will be randomized to one of two interventions. Participants assigned to the multitask practice intervention (MPI) will practice multitasking the two tasks over multiple days. Those assigned to the single-task practice intervention (SPI) will instead practice each task separately while controlling for the total number of practice opportunities associated with each task across the interventions. Both before and after the practice, the ability of all participants to perform both tasks simultaneously will be behaviorally measured using a well-established psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm, and their neural representations will be measured using functional MRI while they perform the two tasks. Researchers will then compare improvements in multitasking behavior across the two groups, as well as changes in neural representational geometry of the tasks in the lateral prefrontal cortex and control brain regions, and test whether multitasking training is associated with specific changes in neural representations in the lateral prefrontal cortex.

Primary Outcome

Overall neural separability (also referred to as shattering dimensionality) will be measured by employing cross-validated neural decoding of lateral PFC fMRI BOLD multi-voxel patterns, averaging decoding accuracies across all balanced dichotomies of the task inputs. Task-relevant neural separability will be measured by averaging decoding accuracies across all task-relevant variables.

Conditions Studied

Interventions

• BEHAVIORAL Multitask Practice Intervention (MPI)
• BEHAVIORAL Single-task Practice Intervention (SPI)

Study Locations (1)