High-intensity physiological activation disrupts the neural signatures of conflict processing

Abstract

Physical activation fluctuates throughout the day. Previous studies have shown that during periods of reduced activation, cognitive control remains resilient due to neural compensatory mechanisms. In this study, we in-vestigated the effects of high physical activation on both behavioural and neural markers of cognitive control. We hypothesized that while behavioural measures of cognitive control would remain intact during periods of high activation, there would be observable changes in neural correlates. In our electroencephalography study, we manipulated levels of physical activation through physical exercise. Although we observed no significant impact on behavioural measures of cognitive conflict, both univariate and multivariate time-frequency markers proved unreliable under conditions of high activation. Moreover, there was no modulation of whole-brain connectivity measures by physical activation. We suggest that this dissociation between behavioural and neural measures indicates that the human cognitive control system remains resilient even at high activation, possibly due to underlying neural compensatory mechanisms.