https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0688-5722
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ABSTRACT
Inhibition is one of the core components of cognitive control. In experimental tasks which measure cognitive inhibition, performance may vary according to an interplay of individuals’ chronotype and the time of day of testing (“synchrony effect”, or the beneficial impact on cognitive performance of aligning testing with the time of day preferred by an individual’s chronotype). Some prior studies have reported a synchrony effect specifically emerging in activities which require cognitive inhibition, but not in general processing speed, but existing findings are inconsistent. If genuine, synchrony effects should be taken into account when comparing groups of participants. Here we explored whether synchrony effects emerge in a sample of young adults. In a multi-part online study, we captured various components of inhibition (response suppression; inhibitory control; switching) plus a general measure of processing speed across various times of the day. Individuals’ chronotype was included as a predictor of performance. Critically, we found no evidence of a synchrony effect (an association between chronotype and component of interest where the directionality is dependent on time of testing) in our study.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Wenting Ye, Polly Barr, and Ethan Crossfield for providing their valuable feedback on this manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability statement
Our interpretation of the data used in this study has been presented at the Behavioural Science Online (BeOnline2020) conference and at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, 2021. The material, data and analysis code used in this study can be accessed on Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/xf5cn/?view_only=36a896247421460886278593c174140e).
Supplementary data
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/07420528.2023.2256843.
Notes
1. Deleting data from participants in order to achieve counterbalancing of session order is only necessary if potential learning or practice effects existed across successive sessions. When we re-analysed our data by order of administered session, we found overall RTs of 354 ms for the first block, 321 ms for the second block, and 311 ms for the third block. This suggests that there are indeed substantial learning/practice effects in this task and that therefore session order should be fully counterbalanced.