Attention Tasks

Go/No-Go Task

The Go/No-Go Task is a classical paradigm to investigate inhibition control [38]. The stimulus in this task was a rectangle presented in different corners of the screen. When the rectangle was presented in the upper left, upper right and lower right corners of the computer screen, these are known as Go trials, and when all the rectangles are presented in the lower left corner, these are No-Go trials. The participants were required to press the space bar for Go trials and not to press the space bar for No-Go trials. The error rate on the Go conditions, or errors of omission trials, and the percentage of errors in the No-Go conditions, or errors of commission, were analyzed. In addition, RTs obtained in Go trials by participants were taken into account by both groups.

Stroop Task with Negative Priming (NP)

This task was employed to evaluate inhibitory mechanisms and also interference effects in the NP condition [39]. Each trial started with the presentation of a fixation point (a cross) located in the center of the screen. Immediately afterwards, a word written in a determinate color appeared (for example, the word BLUE written in red ink). Participants had to press, as quickly as possible, the key that corresponded to the color of the ink in which the word was written (red), regardless of the word's meaning. There were four possible colors (red, green, blue and yellow), and each was assigned to a key on the keyboard. Congruent trials were those in which the color of the word coincided with the color in which it was presented. Incongruent trials were those in which the color word did not coincide with the color in which it was displayed. Trials were also coded according to the congruency of the previous trial (N-1) in order to evaluate the NP effect for each trial. The measures of the RTs obtained by participants in congruen<sup>t</sup> and incongruent trials were compared to calculate the Stroop effect. The negative priming effect was also calculated by comparing the measures of the RTs obtained by participants in control trials vs. incongruent trials.
