Chen Antao

Chinese Color Nest Project: Growing up in China

To face the challenges of keeping healthy in increasing population sizes of both ageing and developing people in China, a fundamental request from the public health is the development of lifespan normative trajectories of brain and behavior. This paper introduces the Chinese Color Nest Project (CCNP 2013–2022), a large-scale ten-year program of modeling brain and behavioral trajectories for human lifespan (6–85 years old). We plan to gradually collect the behavioral and brain imaging data at ages across the lifespan on nationwide and depict the normal trajectory of Chinese brain development across the lifespan, based on the accelerated longitudinal design in the coming next 10 years starting at 2013. Various psychiatric disorders have been demonstrated highly relevant to abnormal events during the neurodevelopment regarding their onset ages of first episodes. Therefore, delineation of normative growth curves of brain and cognition in typically developing children is extremely useful for monitoring, early detecting and intervention of various neurodevelopmental disorders. In this paper, we detailed the developing part of CCNP, devCCNP. It tracked 192 healthy children and adolescents (6–18 years old) in Beibei district of Chongqing for the first 5 years of the full CCNP cohort (2013–2017). To demonstrate the feasibility of implementing the long-term follow-up of CCNP, we here comprehensively document devCCNP in terms of its experimental design, sample strategies, data acquisition and storage as well as some preliminary results and data sharing roadmap for future. Specifically, we first describe the accelerated longitudinal sampling design as well as its exact ratioof sample dropping off during the data collection. Second, we present several initial findings such as canonical growth curves of cortical surface areas of a set of well-established large-scale functional networks of the human brain. Finally, together with records generated by many psychological and behavioral tests, we will provide an individual growing-up report for each family participating the program, initiating the potential guidance on the individual academic and social development. The resources introduced in the current work can provide first-hand data for a series of coming Chinese brain development studies, such as Chinese Standard MRI Brain Templates, Normative Growth Curves of Chinese Brain and Cognition as well as Mapping of Language Areas in Chinese Developing Brain. These would not only offer normative references of the atypical brain and cognition development for Chinese population but also serve as a strong force on accelerating the pace of integrating Chinese brain development into the national brain program or Chinese Brain Project.

The Influencing Factors of Subliminal Semantic Priming Effects

The subliminal semantic priming effects refer to the facilitated processing of target words when they proceeded by a semantically and associatively related prime word,even when the primes were presented subliminally.Subliminal semantic priming has its instability and is easily affected by various types of factors.The influencing factors include external and internal factors.The external factors are task,stimuli materials,procedure and so on.The internal factors are attention,task set,intentions and expectations.Firstly,the histories of subliminal semantic priming studies were reviewed and the paradigm and methods for testing awareness were introduced briefly.Then,the article focused on discussing and summering its influencing factors.Further research could be explored from optimizing paradigms,enhancing the study of brain mechanism and developing the theories.

The alertness level influences post-error adjustments

Post-error adjustment indicates that individuals execute a chain of adjustments after committing errors to reduce the likelihood of repeating an error, which is important for our survival and evolution. It includes post-error slowing (PES), post-error improvement in accuracy (PIA), and post-error reduction of interference (PERI) three types. However, there are still intensive disputes about the generation mechanisms of the post-error adjustment. The cognitive control account suggests that errors are associated with the error monitoring and a subsequent intensification of top-down control. After committing an error, the error signal will initiate cognitive control mechanisms to improve subsequent performance by activating the anterior cingulate cortex. In this case, increased cognitive control enables flexible recruitment of attentional resources to the goal-related dimension in the subsequent task. However, the orienting account assumes that the infrequent events can easily capture the attentional resources, and thus participants need to take more time to reorient the subsequent task. The remaining resources will be insufficient to perform effectively the subsequent task, behaving as decreased post-error accuracy. Therefore, how the attention influences the post-error adjustment remains unclear. To address the above issue, we first employed an attention network test (ANT) to evaluate the attention function of each participant. The ANT task was developed to measure the efficiency of the attentional networks including alerting, orienting and executive control through a simple cue (asterisk) and arrow Flanker task. There were four cue conditions: no cue, center cue, double cue, and spatial cue. In the no cue condition, only the fixation cross was presented in the center of the screen. In the center cue condition, an asterisk was presented in the center of the screen. In the double cue and spatial cue conditions, the fixation cross was always presented in the center of the screen. However, for the double cue condition, two asterisks were presented simultaneously at two possible target positions; for the spatial cue condition, an asterisk was presented at the target position. Additionally, the efficiency of alerting was defined as RT no cue– RT double cue, the efficiency of orienting was defined as RT center cue– RT spatial cue, and the efficiency of executive control was defined as RT incongruent– RT congruent. Then, we employed a letter Flanker task to examine the participants’ performance in the post-error trials. PES was calculated by the RT of correct trials following errors minus the RT of correct trials following correct responses. PIA was calculated by the accuracy following errors minus the accuracy following correct response. And PERI was calculated by the interference magnitude ( RT incongruent– RT congruent) following correct responses minus the interference magnitude following errors. To investigate which function of the attentional network influences the post-error adjustment, we correlated the scores of alerting, orienting and executive control with PES, PIA, and PERI, respectively. Finally, based on the correlation result, we grouped the participants as high altering level group (32% participants) and low alerting level group (32% participants) to further examine the individual difference in the post-error adjustment. As a result, we found that only the alerting score was negatively correlated with PES and PIA. Moreover, in the individual difference analysis, we found that the PES was only observed in the low alerting level group, but this effect was absent in the high alerting level group. For the PIA, there was no significant difference between two groups. These results may suggest that the alerting function plays an important role in the post-error adjustments, especially for the PES. High alerting level group has an advantage on enhanced alertness; they accordingly complete post-error adjustment with high efficiency.