Indeed, recent findings suggest an increased task-related recruitment of rostral cingulate and decreased coactivation of amygdala and cingulate in depressed patients [6].
Figure 4: Brain regions showing decreased Hurst exponent (H) going from run-2 to run-1 of a task (increasing task novelty).
Performance can be improved (up to a point) by increasing task complexity, and in some vigilance situations the introduction of a secondary task can actually improve performance on the primary task.
A further question, therefore, concerns whether the target selective response within frontoparietal sub-regions varies as a function of increasing task familiarity, and if so, in what way?
In other words, the observed attenuation of TRPD likely represents a correlate of the effect that task execution becomes less effortful and less attention demanding as a result of increasing task automaticity.
The current study replicates and extends previous findings by demonstrating that an unpredictable context can increase task performance and selectively potentiate the ERN in children and adolescents.
The intervention group received an adaptive training with increasing task load.
A secondary hypothesis was that increasing task difficulty (i.e., number of stimuli to encode) would alter both hemodynamic response amplitude [10], [23] and inter-regional functional connectivity in both groups.
As a result, even though the spelling of the consonant cluster sounds in the Struiksma study was identical, their acoustic properties changed whenever a different vowel followed, thereby increasing task demands.
Evaluation results demonstrate the usefulness of an increased expressive power for task models, and their acceptance by users.
