RESUMEN
Inhibitory control performance may differ greatly as a function of individual differences such as anxiety. Nonetheless, how cognitive control proficiency might be influenced by exposure to various environments and how anxiety traits might impact these effects remain unexplored. A cohort of thirty healthy volunteers participated in the study. Participants performed a Go/No-Go task before exposure to a 'forest' and 'urban' virtual environment, in a counterbalanced design, before repeating the GNG task. The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) was finally filled-in. Our findings unveiled an initial negative correlation between anxiety trait levels and GNG task performance, consistent with the established literature attributing difficulties in inhibitory functionality to anxiety. Additionally, different environmental exposures reported opposite trends. Exposure to the 'forest' environment distinctly improved the GNG performance in relation to anxiety traits, while the 'urban' setting demonstrated adverse effects on task performance. These results underscore the intricate relationship among cognitive control, environmental exposure, and trait anxiety. In particular, our findings highlight the potential of natural settings, such as forests, to mitigate the impact of anxiety on inhibition. This might have implications for interventions aimed at improving cognitive control.
RESUMEN
The dual-process theory of thought rests on the co-existence of two different thinking modalities: a quick, automatic, and associative process opposed to a slow, thoughtful, and deliberative process. The increasing interest in determining the neural foundation of the dual-process distinction has yielded mixed results, also given the difficulty of applying the fMRI standard approach to tasks usually employed in the cognitive literature. We report an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis to investigate the neural foundation of the dual-process theory of thought. Eligible studies allowed for the identification of cerebral areas associated with dual-process theory-based tasks without differentiating between fast and slow thinking. The ALE algorithm converged on the medial frontal cortex, superior frontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, insula, and left inferior frontal gyrus. These structures partially overlap with the cerebral areas recurrently reported in the literature about the neural basis of the dual-process distinction, where the PARCS theory-based interpretation emphasizes the role of the right inferior gyrus. The results confirm the potential (but still almost unexplored) common ground between the dual-process literature and the cognitive control literature.