Cognitive and neural underpinnings of cognitive control in the Dot-Pattern Expectancy Task.

Continuous Performance Tasks (CPTs) are widely used for assessing cognitive function in psychological, psychiatric, and neurological disorders. The present study seeks to establish the construct and predictive validity of a commonly used CPT - The Dot Pattern Expectancy Task (DPX), by showing how neural measures relate to specific patterns of behavioural performance. To achieve this, we first fit generative models to parse individual biases and parameters that characterise the evidence accumulation process at a single-trial level. Second, we investigate whether electroencephalographic (EEG) activity recorded during the same task tracks individual differences in the cognitive modelling parameters. Results indicate that evidence accumulation models can, in principle, separate preparatory and corrective mechanisms in the DPX. In addition, different spatiotemporal patterns of evoked activity correlated with different model parameters allowing a finer-grained, theory-driven perspective on cognitive and neural processes underpinning variability in CPT performance.