The role of contextual factors on neurocognitive processing: a systematic review with meta-analysis of the effect of response types in cognitive tasks

ABSTRACT

Cognitive performance depends on contextual elements, such as the response type (“Go/No-Go” (GNG) or “Two-Alternative Choice” (TAC)) used in experimental tasks. In general, it is assumed that GNG shows faster response times and lower error rates than TAC. To systematically analyze these effects, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to assess the effect of GNG and TAC on cognitive processing across experimental paradigms. After examination of diverse databases, 24 scientific articles were included. We found eight different cognitive tasks, presentling results mainly of behavioural variables, with only three studies including neural recordings. We found that GNG shows faster response times and lower error rates than TAC, although this changes depending on task configurations. The scarce neural evidence suggests that the differences might occur at early processing stages. Future simultaneously recorded behavioural and electrophysiological data is needed to gain better understanding of these contextual effects.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognitive processes
• experimental cognitive tasks
• Go/No-Go‌
• Two-Alternative Choice
• visual information processing
• contextual factors

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Free access to meta-analysis data in OSF (https://osf.io/c6tnb). In OSF you can also access all the material related to the process of this work (https://osf.io/jkbev/files/osfstorage).

Notes

1 For this work, “target stimulus” will refer to the content of the visual stimulus that meets the task’s requirement. When it appears on the screen, the participants must direct an open GNG response (i.e., Go response) and an affirmative response in TAC (i.e., Yes response).

2 We are indebted to an anonymous reviewer of this article for suggesting the idea of this plot.

3 Wühr and Heuer's (2022) results are not considered here because they counterbalanced the target stimulus for each participant.

Additional information

Funding

This project was financed by the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo de Chile (ANID) through the Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico (FONDECYT) Iniciación en Investigación N° 11190604 granted to DRL and FONDECYT Postdoctorado N° 3220844 granted to SCC.