Bilinguals have been shown to perform better in a vast pallet of tasks hinting at having a better developed and more effective executive control network.
The advantages range from superior inhibition of irrelevant information, enhanced decision making to faster problem solving and shifting between mental sets and even improved creativity.
Because everything in the brain is connected and for bilinguals has been shown that they can compensate and use some are differently or more efficiently (less activation-better performance), we would like to know if this extends to the field of salience perception. ??
Typically, the area investigated and involved in salience guided attention is posterior parietal cortex (PPC). LEFT is critically involved in attention for low-salience stimuli in the presence of highly salient distractors and the RIGHT one is involved in attending to more salient stimuli.
We would really appreciate any suggestion on how an experimental paradigm could be created using TMS or tDCS to test whether bilinguals are better (faster, more accurate) at a global-local salience task.
Please do not hesitate to PM and ask any further questions! Thank You in advance and thanks for this lovely scientific community!
Dear Jure,
To answer your very interesting question, here is a sketch of a study:
Basic assumptions:
1. What you call salience perception is the same as, or close to, perceptual attention, whether bottom-up or top-down.
2. All selective attention, perceptual or executive, has two major components, one intensive (focus, concentration) and the other exclusionary (inhibitory control of interference or distraction).
3. The prefrontal cortex serves both components, the dorsolateral cortex primarily the first, the inferolateral (orbital) cortex the second.
4. All attention makes use of cognitive networks (cognits) of established memory and knowledge in the cerebral cortex.
5. Cognitive networks with linguistic associations are mainly, but not exclusively, distributed in the cortex of the left hemisphere.
6. Bilingual individuals, and polyglots, have wider and better connected networks, especially semantic networks, than monolingual individuals.
Methods:
1. As independent variables, use anodal tDCS of frontal cortex, right, left, and bilateral.
2. As dependent variables, take measures of performance and reaction time of (a) working-memory tasks to test executive selective attention to perceptually elicited internal representations, and (b) Stroop task or equivalent to test inhibitory control of interference and irrelevancy.
Predictions:
1. Frontal stimulation will enhance performance of both types of tasks.
2. Left and bilateral stimulation will be more effective than right stimulation (?).
3. Reaction times in both types of tasks will be shortened by stimulation.
For more background, you may consult my publications and those of others in RG.
Cheers and good luck. Joaquín.
Addendum to Predictions:
4. Of course. all effects will be more prominent in bilinguals than monolinguals. Joaquín
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