Role of selective attention in conflict resolution during action-based decision making : an EEG study

Details

Supervisors

Duque, Julie ; Klein, Pierre-Alexandre

Faculty

Faculté des sciences de la motricité

Degree label

Master [60] en kinésithérapie et réadaptation

Abstract

Classically, decision making involves at least two critical interrelated processes: selective attention and response selection. Response selection has been extensively studied in the context of decisions that are made based on conflicting sensory information but much less is known about how conflict impacts on selective attention processes in sensory areas during decision making. In our pilot study, we aimed at assessing this point. Participants performed a version of the Eriksen Flanker task in which they were asked to indicate by a left or right button-press the orientation of a briefly presented left- or right-facing central arrow (the target), flanked by a set of two distractor arrows on each side (the flankers). Difficulty of the trials was manipulated to produce two different conditions; in the first one, subjects expected they would have to face conflict on most trials and in the second one, conflict trials are less present. During this action-based decision making task, selective attention was assessed in each trial of those two conditions recording steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs), that is an EEG measurement. Our preliminary data are encouraging as they support the modulation of selective attention by conflict during decision making. Indeed, when conflict is expected to be high, participants focused more intensively on relevant visual information, ignoring the surrounding irrelevant information. On the contrary, when subjects expected conflict to be low, they did not focus as much on the relevant information. Moreover, this enhanced selective attention seemed to result from the facilitation of the representation of the correct information (target) rather than the inhibition of the irrelevant information (flankers).