People with chronic widespread pain experience a lack of control over time through deployment of their bodies in managing the activities of everyday life, first through the increasing time it can take to complete tasks, and second, through an inability to sustain tasks for any length of time.
Therefore, working memory drives efficient inhibition by sustaining task instructions and appropriate responses throughout task execution.
The results have implications for research into mind wandering, implying that a baseline of sustained task focus is not the norm when driving the daily commute.
The hand performance was evaluated by maximum volitional contraction (MVC) and its associated time needed to reach the MVC (TMVC), and the total force generation (TFG) during the sustained task.
The hand fatigue was assessed by MVC degeneration (ΔMVC), the shift in time needed to reach the MVC (ΔTMVC), and the maximal endurance time (MET) associated with the sustained task.
The simplicity of instructions and the familiarity of picture stimuli used in this study were intended to enable sustained task engagement.
Because the most consistent attentional control-related characterization of the core CO regions pertains to their involvement in sustained, task set-maintenance (and this event-related study design did not measure the task-related sustained signal), the exact specification of the role of the trial-by-trial BOLD signals observed here entails some amount of speculation.
Recent fMRI studies in adults have used mixed blocked/event-related designs to extract activity consistent with separable sustained, task-related processes and transient, trial-related processes.
Two studies were conducted to assess the ability of this design to detect and dissociate sustained task-related from transient trial-related activity.
Results extend the feasibility of direct statistical comparison of adults and children; mixed designs provide a means to examine neural activity in both adults and children related to sustained, task-level processes, likely related to task-level control.
