The influence of emotional contexts on mental flexibility in Prader–Willi syndrome

Abstract

Background The present study investigated the influence of emotional contexts on mental flexibility in adults with Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) using a voluntary task-switching paradigm that was implemented with emotionally valenced pictures. The study aims were to assess whether adults with PWS have impaired switching abilities, whether the deficit is specific to PWS or linked to intellectual disabilities, and the influence of emotional contexts on performance. Method The task-switching performance of 30 adults with PWS was compared with that of 30 healthy adults matched on chronological age, and to that of 30 adults with intellectual disabilities but without PWS, matched on intellectual quotient level and chronological age. Indicators of switching performance were switching cost and repetition bias. Emotional contexts were operationalised with positive, neutral and negative task-irrelevant pictures. Results Adults with PWS showed a large increase in switching costs compared with the two control groups, and this effect did not vary across emotional contexts. More fine-tuned examination revealed subtle performance modulations: negative contexts tended to increase the repetition bias in all three groups while positive contexts slowed down global performance in PWS. Conclusions The results confirmed previous studies, showing impaired switching abilities in PWS over and beyond the influence of intellectual level, but revealed no robust variations in switching deficits across emotional contexts.

The Role of Effector-Specific Task Representations in Voluntary Task Switching

“…Critically, each task needs to be mapped to different response effectors so that the response can be used to infer which task was selected. Probably the most widely used task-to-effector mapping approach is to map each task to one hand (e.g., left index and middle finger = color task; right index and middle finger = letter task) (e.g., Arrington & Logan, 2004 ; 2005 ; Brüning et al, 2020 ; Chevalère et al, 2022 ; Frick et al, 2019 ; Jurczyk et al, 2019 ; Kessler et al, 2009 ; Mayr & Bell, 2006 ).…”

Executive function and intellectual disability: innovations, methods and treatment

“…Along these lines, EF in adults with Prader–Willi syndrome is examined by Chevalère et al (2022), in this special issue, with a particular focus on the connection between cognitive flexibility and emotion processing. Individuals with Prader–Willi syndrome are at elevated risk for emotional lability and difficulties with emotion identification.…”