The present study examines the effect of financial scarcity on cognitive performance by not only measuring the objective, but also the subjective aspect of scarcity, contrary to earlier research in...Show moreThe present study examines the effect of financial scarcity on cognitive performance by not only measuring the objective, but also the subjective aspect of scarcity, contrary to earlier research in this field. Cognitive performance was measured by means of a cognitive control task and a working memory task. A moderating effect of cognitive load was tested by randomly assigning participants into either a ‘difficult’ or ‘easy’ condition, determining the level of difficulty of the financial scenarios they had to solve. This effect could not be rejected, nor supported. By use of the Psychological Inventory of Financial Scarcity (PIFS), this study finds support for the relationship between subjective financial scarcity and cognitive performance. More specifically, we demonstrate an effect on cognitive control, while no support was found an effect on working memory. This study underwrites the importance of a measurement of subjective financial scarcity and encourages future research to uncover the true impact of the cognitive load in the minds of the poor.Show less
Cognitive control is ubiquitous in daily life. From academic success to eating healthy, cognitive control is needed to monitor and direct goal-driven behavior. Recent findings have suggested a link...Show moreCognitive control is ubiquitous in daily life. From academic success to eating healthy, cognitive control is needed to monitor and direct goal-driven behavior. Recent findings have suggested a link between cognitive control and affective states. Various types of positive affect have been shown to reduce adaptation to conflict in cognitive control functions. In this study, we examine the effects of positive affective touch on cognitive control and activation of corrugator supercilii (facial frowning muscle) during a Stroop-like conflict task. Positive affect was induced with brush stroking at the optimal speed (3 cm/s) to stimulate CT afferents in the forearm. We predicted that positive tactile affect would reduce conflict adaptation and transient corrugator response to conflict. Additionally, we predicted it would reduce sustained corrugator activation during three timeframes: Each trial block, each touch application and the first touch application of each trial block. We did not find robust evidence suggesting that positive affective touch modulates cognitive control, nor did we find that it reduced corrugator response to conflict. Furthermore, positive affective touch did not reduce the sustained corrugator activation in any timeframe. However, our findings showed that positive affective touch reduces the overall transient corrugator activation immediately following a trial response. We suggest that (a) some baseline amount of negative affect is inherent to action selection in conflict tasks, and (b) positive affective touch increases μ-opioid activation in the anterior cingulate cortex which suppresses negative affect. Lastly, we speculate why the affective quality of CT optimal touch might not be strong enough to produce behavioral changes in the Stroop-like conflict task used in this study.Show less
The prospect of reward has increasingly been shown to influence modes of cognitive control. Recent work by Fröber and Dreisbach (2016) showed that performance contingent reward increases proactive...Show moreThe prospect of reward has increasingly been shown to influence modes of cognitive control. Recent work by Fröber and Dreisbach (2016) showed that performance contingent reward increases proactive control, while non-contingent reward decreases proactive control and possibly increases reactive control. According to the Metacontrol State Model (Hommel, 2015), the differential effects of reward on cognitive control can be understood as a tradeoff between cognitive persistence and flexibility. Persistence refers to a mode of control that allows for strong maintenance of goal-relevant information and the suppression of irrelevant information, while flexibility refers to a mode of control that facilitates switching between tasks by allowing for more efficient consideration of irrelevant information. While evidence suggests that contingent reward promotes persistence and non-contingent reward decreases persistence, it is not clear whether non-contingent reward promotes flexibility. The aim of the present study was to expand on previous findings by investigating whether contingent reward promotes persistence and whether non-contingent reward promotes flexibility, by employing two cognitive tasks that presumably benefit from either persistence or flexibility, namely the Simon task and the Attentional Blink task. Participants were allocated to three conditions (e.g., contingent, non-contingent, and control) and performed both tasks in a single session. Participant allocation and task completion were counterbalanced. Both performance contingent and non-contingent reward promoted cognitive flexibility in the Simon task, or at least decreased cognitive persistence, but had no effect in the Attentional blink task. While these results support the general finding that reward differentially modulates cognitive control, they further underline the importance of considering the cognitive paradigm used to assess changes in cognitive control.Show less
