" Brain activities during Go/No-Go

Association Task "

Kouichi Hioki1,
Katsunori Matsuoka2, Hiroshi Watanabe2,
Hiroyuki Umemura2

1Kobe University Graduate school of letters, Kobe, Japan.

2National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology,

Human Stress Signal Research Center, Japan.

E-mail:kohioki@lit.kobe-u.ac.jp
 Plan of presentation
 What is Go/No-Go Association Task(GNAT)
 Our Opinion
 Neurophysiological knowledge
 Method and result
 Conclusion
 What is Go/No-Go Association Task
(Dilemma of social psychology)
 Although discrimination still exists, White
Americans tend to answer that they don’t have
prejudice to African Americans(Wittenbrink,
Judd, Park., 1997.).
↓
 Some distortion is included in measurement in
question papers.
 What is GNAT
 Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, (1998) noted
that there are some differences in reaction time to
stereotype words between high and low prejudice
person.
 And they created Implicit Association Test(IAT) as
a measure for implicit prejudiced degree.
 Then, Nosek ＆ Banaji(2001) created Go/No-Go
Association Task(GNAT) as an improved version
of IAT.
 What is GNAT
Bugs Good

Sunflower
Honer
Rose
Cockroach
Poison
Happy
Lucky
Sad
Flea
Lily
Spider
Evil
 What is GNAT
Flower Bad

Sunflower
Honer
Rose
Cockroach
Poison
Happy
Lucky
Flea
Sad
Evil
Lily
Spider
 What is GNAT
 GNAT is considered to be the tool which
measures the strength of the implicit
association between a concept and an
attribute category.
 However, it remains an unsettled question
whether the GNAT score is a score which
reflected "Association" truly.
 Our Opinion
 While performing the incongruent trials (e.g.,
discriminating “Flower” and “Bad” from
distracters), we should be making the conflict
state occur.
 And while performing the congruent
trials(“Flower” and “Good”) , a conflict state
will not occur.
 They can be checked on Neurophysiologcally.
 Neurophysiological knowledge
Conflict state:
 The characteristic which a stimulus has crosses

(“Bug”=bad ⇔ “Good” = good)

and the amount of information which should be processed
increases.
・ When a conflict state occurs, Anterior Cingulate
Cortex(ACC) will also be activated
（Fan, Flombaum, McCandliss, Thomas, & Posner, 2003）.
 Hypothesis
 While performing the incongruent trials (e.g.,
discriminating “Flower” and “Bad” from
distracters), we should be making the conflict
state occur.
 While performing the congruent
trials(“Flower” and “Good”) , a conflict state
will not occur.
 In Incongruent trials.
→Negative brain waves would be checked
 In Congruent trials.

→Negative brain waves wouldn’t be checked

 Method
 Participants:4 male participants
 Recorded Event Related Potentials(ERP) with 5
tin electrodes during GNAT trials .
 Trial:

Congruent Trial(72trials):
Discriminating “Flower” and “Good” from
distracters
Incongruent Trial (72trials) :
Discriminating “Flower” and “Bad” from
distracters
 Data Sampling
 Sampling late: 1000Hz.
 Base line: left earlobe

 Filter: Below 0.5Hz. Above 30Hz.

 Fz/Cz/C3/C4/Pz（The10‐20system）
 Results
 All the participants showed short reaction
time in Congruent Trials.
 Waveforms(Congruent Trial)
μV

8
6
4
2
0
-2
-4
-6
-8

30

60

90
-1

-1

-9

-6

-3

re

12
sp

0
50

20

00

00

00

00
on
0

se

FZ CZ PZ C3 C4
μV
Waveforms(Incongruent Trial)
8
6
4
2
0
-2
-4
-6
-8

30

60

90
-1

-1

-9

-6

-3

re

12
sp

0
50

20

00

00

00

00
on
0

se

FZ CZ PZ C3 C4
μV
Waveforms(FZ)
8
6
4
2
0
-2
-4
-6
-8
-1 -1 -9 -6 -3 re 30 60 90 12
50 20 00 00 00 sp 0 0 0 00
0 0 on
se

Fz(Congruent) Fz(Incongruent)
 Conclusion
 All the participants showed short reaction
time in Congruent Trials.
 Only in Incongruent trials, the
negative waveform has been checked
at after about 200ms from the
reaction .
 The ACC activated only in GNAT
Incongruent trials.
 Therefore, we can say the GNAT time –
lag may reflect cognitive conflict.