ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2025
Phasic Alertness Impairs Cognitive Control by Amplifying Competition between Evidence Accumulators.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Trial history shapes the alerting-congruency interaction in selective attention.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Subcortical nuclei of the human ascending arousal system encode anticipated reward but do not predict subsequent memory.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Neural basis of the interaction between alerting and executive control.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Although phasic alertness generally benefits cognitive performance, it often increases the impact of distracting information, resulting in impaired decision-making and cognitive control. However, it is unclear why phasic alertness has these negative effects. Here, we present a novel, biologically informed account, according to which phasic alertness generates a transient, evidence-independent input (TEI) to the decision process. This shortens overall response times but also amplifies competition between evidence accumulators, thus slowing down decision-making and impairing cognitive control. The key hypotheses of this account are supported with pupil measurements and electrophysiological data from human decision-makers of either sex performing an arrow flanker task. We also show that a computational model of the flanker task that incorporates a TEI can reproduce the behavioral effects of phasic alertness but only when the evidence accumulators compete with each other through lateral inhibition. Our results reveal a close interplay between dynamic changes in alertness, cognitive control, and evidence accumulation.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.