Experimental Paradigms Commonly Used for Cognitive Control and Executive Function (Most Complete Ever)

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Experimental Paradigm (Experimental Paradigm): refers to the more classical experimental tasks in the study of various psychological processes and various branches of psychology. That is, relatively fixed experimental procedures.

Cognitive science and experimental psychologist Chen Lin academician pointed out that: Psychological Experimental Paradigm is one of the three foundations of cognitive science, the other two foundations are psychological variables and brain imaging technology.

As you can see, the experimental paradigm is one of the most difficult and essential parts of psychology, especially cognitive psychology! I have therefore organized for you some common experimental paradigms used in cognitive control and executive function research.

Response inhibition and interference control tasks

1. Antisaccade (reverse eye-tracking task)

The experiment requires subjects to inhibit gaze at a peripheral target and gaze at the opposite of it.

2. Stop-signal

Subjects were asked to press the right and left buttons, respectively, when they saw a stimulus (e.g., ">" or "<") appear on the screen. If you hear a "beep" as a stop signal, you stop pressing either key.

3, Stroop (Stroop paradigm)

The experimenter presents the subject with words written in different colors, and asks the subject to say the color of each word as quickly and correctly as possible, ignoring the name of the word and what it means.

4. Flanker (Lateral Inhibition Task)

When a central target stimulus is presented simultaneously with two distractor stimuli, the irrelevant information from the two distractor stimuli interferes with the subject's judgment of the central target stimulus. In the incongruent condition, have the subject press the "K" key; in the congruent condition, have the subject press the "C" key; and in the no distractor stimulus condition, have the subject press the "C" key.

Working memory and updating task

5. N-back task

Subjects were asked to compare the current stimulus with the Nth preceding stimulus, and to manipulate the load by controlling the number of stimuli between the current stimulus and the target stimulus. When N=1, subjects were asked to compare the current stimulus with the previous stimulus adjacent to it; when N=2, the current stimulus was compared with the stimulus in a position one position apart from it; when N=3, the comparison was asked to be between the current stimulus and the stimulus two positions apart from it, and so on to obtain varying degrees of task difficulty.

6, Letter memory (letter memory task also known as active memory task)

The subject is asked to listen to or look at a series of strings of unknown length, and the subject has two ways of recalling them in the series, one is to recall as many strings as possible, and the other is to recall only a few of the most recently presented strings. Here, for example, subjects were asked to say aloud the three most recent letters in order. If presented with the letters L, R, Z, and Q, the subject should report L, LR, LRZ, and RZQ in that order.

7. Backward digit span (backward digit task)

The subject is presented with a series of numbers, "3658789", and is asked to memorize them backward. Then, the correct sequence reported by the subject should be: "9878563".

8, Self-ordered selection tasks (self-ordered selection tasks)

In each trial of a set of stimulus pictures to choose a new stimulus, the subjects were asked to avoid choosing the picture stimulus selected in the previous trial. The task is suitable for studying children's executive functions. First, the child is shown a picture with 2 small pictures on it and chooses one of them at random. Next, the child is presented with a picture with 2 small pictures identical to the one seen earlier but in a different positional arrangement, and is asked to point to the one that was not selected earlier. The researcher then presented the child with a new picture, which added a new picture to the original 2 pictures, and the original 2 pictures were arranged differently from the previous picture, and the child was asked to point out which picture had not been selected, and so on. This research method is actually a measure of picture memory breadth, and in this way reveals that there is a regular age-related increase in working memory throughout childhood.

Thinking Stereotype Shift Task

9. Cued switch tasks

Subjects are asked to categorize key responses to stimuli based on a cue to make judgments about the color and shape of the stimulus. The left button indicated a circle or green color, and the right button indicated a red color or triangle. When the subject sees that the current letter is the same as the previous trial, the same color judgment is made for the current stimulus; otherwise, the shape judgment is made for the current stimulus, and so on.

Thinking Flexibility and Planning Test

10, Wisconsin Card Sorting Test

Subjects were asked to sort cards into piles according to their color, number, or shape, and allowed to discover the rules based on the feedback they received from the sorting piles. After 10 consecutive correct categorizations, the categorization rules are changed. This task was *** There were 4 stimulus cards located at the top of the screen and 128 response cards, each of which was 8cm*8cm in size, with 1 to 4 triangles, stars, crosses, or circles drawn on the cards in the colors of red, green, blue, and yellow, respectively. Four of the stimulus cards were drawn with pictures of 1 red triangle, 2 green stars, 3 yellow crosses, and 4 blue circles, and were placed on top of the card box in the above order. The classification principle was set by the computer (color, number, or shape), and subjects were required to keep trying, analyzing, and reasoning to find the classification principle set by the computer.

11. Intra- and extradimensional shifting and reversal learning

Subjects were presented with target cards that had patterns of different shapes and lines, and then were presented with a series of test cards in which they were asked to make a distinction between one of the dimensions (e.g., a line) and the other (e.g., a line). After six correct classifications, subjects were asked to classify on one of the dimensions (e.g., shape-internal dimension; line pattern-external dimension) an equal number of times on the other dimension. Subjects were examined for their ability to flexibly switch between two incompatible rules.

12, Trail Making Test (connecting test)

The subject is asked to alternately connect sequential numbers and letters (such as 1-A-2-B-3-C). The test will usually have a baseline condition, i.e., it needs to be compared to a condition (baseline) in which consecutive numbers or consecutive letters are connected (the non-alternating case).

13, Tower of London

The Tower of London task is a variation of the Tower of Hanoi, and Shallice replaced the discs in the Tower of Hanoi task with colored balls, asking subjects to describe how to transform the initial arrangement of the balls into the target arrangement.

14. Verbal fluency

Subjects were asked to recall as many words beginning with F as they could in 60 seconds.

15, Dual task (dual task paradigm)

Let the subjects perform two different tasks at the same time, for example, draw a box on a piece of paper at the same time, classify the words you hear (to determine the attributes of the word: man-made, natural).

Thermal Cognitive Control and Decision Making Tests

16, Delay discounting (delay discounting task aka time discounting)

Requires subjects to choose between a smaller immediate reward and a larger delayed reward.?

17. Iowa Gambling Task

Requires subjects to learn to choose between decks of cards A-D with different reward/loss payoffs. Deck A: gives a $100 reward each time, but has a $35-$150 penalty 5 out of 10 times in a row; Deck B: gives a $100 reward each time, but has a $1,250 penalty once out of 10 times in a row; Deck C: gives a $50 reward each time, but has a $25-$75 penalty 5 out of 10 times in a row; Deck D: gives a $50 reward each time but with a $250 penalty on one of 10 consecutive occasions. Before the task began, subjects were unaware of the number and frequency of rewards and penalties in the decks, and were simply told to choose any one of the four decks at a time in order to win as many points as possible after choosing multiple times.

18, Emotional Stroop (Emotional Stroop task)

The Emotional Stroop task is a variant of the classic Stroop paradigm, where emotional words are used as stimuli, and subjects are asked to name the color of the words.

19, Emotional n-back (Emotional n-back paradigm)

Let the subject judge the potency of each emotional picture stimulus, for example, the figure below shows the Emotional 2-back task, let the subject judge whether the potency of the current emotional picture stimulus is matched with the 2-back, i.e., let the subject judge whether the potency of the current emotional picture is the same as the previous one. trial.