INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL for ADVANCED STUDIES Cognitive
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INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL FOR ADVANCED STUDIES Cognitive Neuroscience Sector, SISSA-ISAS, Trieste, Italy. * Bridging Access to Consciousness, Cognitive Control and Metacognition : Toward an Application to schizophrenia Sarah Kouhou, PhD Thesis, * Supervisor: Tim Shallice, PhD, Professor * External Reviewers: Paolo Brambilla, M.D PhD Jérôme Sackur, M.D PhD Acknowledgments I would like to thank all the people who helped me, knowingly or not, to complete that work: My supervisor, Tim, for his huge patience and his critical empiricism; my aunt, Marie, for having been there when I needed ; my friends or colleagues in SISSA, especially Georgette and Shima, for their kindness; the Abdu Salam Center of Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in general and overall the library staff, just for providing me with a nice space for work, serious, stimulating and convivial. I also thank Guillaume, for having given me energy and force at the very right moment. I am also very thankful to Paolo, who showed an interest in my proposal to work with patients and who contributed a lot to accessing the Health Center. Elisa Maso, who was very efficient and available to make me interact with patients, although she was very busy. I am also thankful to the patients themselves, who devoted their time and psychological resources, for free. I thank also all the subjects who participated to my tiresome experiments, with patience, kindness and seriousness. Table of contents PART I: Bridging Access to Consciousness, Cognitive Control and Metacognition, A dense overview 1 1. Demonstrating the existence of unconscious processing before all 5 2. Consciousness as a capacity-limited Global Workspace 9 2.1 Three pieces of behavioral evidence for a central Global Workspace 2.2 Neural correlates of a central Global Workspace: a causal role of prefrontal cortex? 3. Executive Control per se and its links with consciousness 14 3.1 How to define executive control and how to define its link with consciousness 3.2 Cognitive Control and Global Workspace architectures: Strict equivalence or just partial overlap? 3.3 Cognitive control as a Supervisory Attentional System 3.3.1 Functional properties of the contention scheduling/SAS architecture. 3.3.2 Hardwiring the contention scheduling/SAS architecture. Triggering data base Contention scheduling Supervisory Attentional System 3.4 Cognitive versus Motivational Control, lateral versus medial prefrontal cortex 3.4.1 Medial Prefrontal Cortex: motivational control? The Anterior Cingulate Cortex as a cornerstone More anterior medial structures 3.4.2 Lateral Prefrontal Cortex and cognitive control Historical steps From working memory to modular segregation Sequential context of behaviors and temporal integration 3.5 Hierarchical Models 3.5.1 the cascade model (Koechlin, 2003) 3.5.2 Badre’s model I 3.6 Decorrelating Cognitive Control Mechanisms and Consciousness 3.6.1 (bottom-up) Influence of non consciously accessed signals on cognitive control mechanisms 3.6.2 Top down influence of cognitive control on subliminal/unconscious information processing 4. Metacognition 37 4.1 A dependence on access to consciousness? 4.2 Unconscious metacognition : a conceptual problem. 5. Conclusions: which bridges between Metacognition, Conscious Processing and Cognitive control? 40 * PART II: Behavioral Evidence for non conscious Priming of Cognitive Control Processes? Which effects on metacognitive performance? Replicating and Exploring 2.1 Introduction 43 2.1.1 Objectives 2.1.2 Plan 2.1.3 Lau and Passingham, 2007 2.1.3.1 Paradigm 2.1.3.2 Behavioral results 2.1.3.3 Problematic aspects 2.2 General procedure 48 2.2.1 Control of Prime visibility 2.2.2 Control of Priming in a simple discrimination task 2.2.3 Preliminary Conclusions 2.3 First Pilot: replicating Lau and Passingham, 2007 52 2.3.1 Paradigm 2.3.2 Subjects, Material and Methods 2.3.3 Results 2.3.4 Preliminary remarks and conclusions II 2.4 Second Pilot 60 2.4.1 Paradigm 2.4.2 Subjects, Material and Methods 2.4.2.1 Basic task: task cueing 2.4.2.2 Metacognitive task: confident self-evaluation 2.4.3 Preliminary Conclusions 2.5 More general Conclusions, Discussions and further investigations 2.5.1 Interpretations of these results: Locus of the effects? 2.5.2 Further investigations Appendix 85 ** PART III: Cognitive control load dependent activations in medial prefrontal cortex by invisible but not by visible primes & an overlap between cognition and metacognition 3.1 Scope and description of the study 87 3.1.1 Notions keys and factors 3.1.2 Some important aspects 3.2 Hypothesis and Expectations 92 3.2.1 Behavior 3.2.2 Neuroimaging 3.3 Materials and Methods 94 3.3.1 Participants. 3.3.2 Stimuli and design 3.3.3 Procedure: training phase and experimental phase 3.3.4 fMRI methods: acquisition and analysis 3.4 Results 100 3.4.1 Basic Task III 3.4.1.1 Behavioral data 3.4.1.2 Neuroimaging data 3.4.1.2.1 Three factor model: SOA(2), compatibility(2) and congruency(2) 3.4.1.2.2 Two factor models (by SOA) : compatibility(2) and congruency(2) Summary: behavioral and neuroimaging outcomes for the basic task 3.4.2 Meta-Tasks 3.4.2.1 Behavioral data 3.4.2.2 Neuroimaging data Summary: behavioral and neuroimaging outcomes for the metacognitive task 3.5 Discussion 115 3.5.1 Basic task: compatibility effects in the short SOA condition, medial prefrontal activation 3.6 Summary of overall theoretical conclusions and further research 120 Appendix 125 *** PART IV : Cognitive Control, Access to Consciousness and Metacognition in Psychosis, an Observational Study 4.1 Introduction: schizophrenia from a cognitive neurosciences point of view 131 4.1.1 Symptomatology of schizophrenia 4.1.2 Accounting for positive symptoms: dopamine dysregulation or specific cognitive disorders? - Sensorimotor efference copy mechanism - Versus ‘Central’ cognitive impairments 4.2 Hypothesis and scope of the study 137 4.2.1 Paradigm 4.2.1.1 Double Staircase Algorithm IV 4.2.1.2 Task-cueing paradigm 4.2.2 Subjects 4.2.3 Procedure 4.3. Results 141 4.3.1 Basic Task: task-cueing combined with masked priming 4.3.1.1 Accuracy 4.3.1.1. a Between group 4.3.1.1. b Within group 4.3.1.2 Reaction Times 4.3.1.2.a Between group 4.3.1.2.b Within group Summary: basic task (task-cueing + masked priming) 4.3.3 Metacognitive task 4.3.3.1 Meta-accuracy 4.3.3.1.a Between group 4.3.3.1.b within group 4.3.3.2 False Alarms (incorrect second-order response after a correct first-order response) 4.3.3.2.a Between group 4.3.3.2.b within group 4.3.3.3 Hits (correct second order response after an incorrect first-order response) 4.3.3.3.a Between group 4.3.3.3.b within group 4.3.3.4 Meta Reaction Times 4.3.3.4.a Between group 4.3.3.4.b within group Summary: the metacognitive task 4.3.4 Correlations between basic and metacognitive aspects of the tasks Summary: correlations between cognitive and metacognitive performance 4.4 Discussion 187 4.4.1 Cognitive aspects 4.4.2 Metacognitive aspects 4.4.3 Correlations between cognitive and metacognitive decisions V 4.5 Conclusions 190 4.6 Overall Conclusions 191 Appendix 1 192 Appendix 2 193 Appendix 3 194 Appendix 4 195 Appendix 5 197 Appendix 6 199 **** PART VI: Overall Conclusions, future research 6.1 Conceptual issues 201 6.2 Empirical issues 202 ***** Bibliography 206 VI PART I: Bridging Access to Consciousness, Cognitive Control and Metacognition, A dense overview From the point of view of the contemporary cognitive neurosciences, cognitive control and consciousness are two clearly distinct notions, each associated with an independent field of investigations and its own conceptual tools. And so it has been through the recent history of the cognitive or psychological sciences: consciousness has long been a concept somewhat monopolized by the psychoanalytic theory, even though that theory has never told anything about consciousness proper, but was only the first one to hypothesize the existence and some properties of the so called Unconscious (Freud, 1896 and later until 1933). Almost in parallel, the notions equivalent to executive control were more developed in the fields of mathematics, computer sciences (Turing, 1936) and what will be become the cybernetics before becoming a paradigm and being introduced in cognitive psychology (Broadbent, 1958) and neuroscience. Throughout the history of sciences, one generally observes a trend of disciplines and of their concepts to become independent of each other. Thus Physics acquired its modern sense, became independent and completely emancipated from Natural Philosophy with Newton's Principia (1687). But one can also observe the reverse process: two phenomena that used to be considered as independent finally turn out 1 to be interacting one with each other, and are integrated into a unique model. The best instance is the interaction between electric and magnetic forces. By showing that an electrical current or a temporal variation of electrical current induces a magnetic field (and vice versa), Oersted (1820) demonstrated in the same vein that these physical forces may have a common deeper physical origin. That allowed Maxwell (1864) to propose an unification of the two theories. Could a unification of models of consciousness and cognitive control occur in the cognitive neurosciences? Such a unification of the models is now possible as, for more than ten years, the phenomenon of Consciousness has been conceptualized within the framework of a specific functional architecture (namely the Global Workspace, see section 2 below). Therefore, that notion can no longer be effectively characterized without referring to this architecture, because (i) the entry of information into the global workspace is equivalent to the access of information into consciousness and, importantly, (ii) the (non) access of information is explained by some properties of that architecture – properties of a central executive system.