| We could find that some people are inclined to do two or more things simultaneously and are able to deal with these things well, while others would like to do things one by one in our life and working time. Obviously, individuals who have different behavioral disposition have different behavioral performance in the face of specific tasks. It has crucial theoretical and practical significance to explore this individuals’ behavioral disposition for talent assessment and job matching in our modern society. Temporal distribution is the concept that describes the personality traits. It refers to the behavior and preference that individual is engaged in one or more tasks in unit time, including polychronic switching and polychronic preference. It is an important dimension of time personality. And time personality focuses on the personality characteristics and individual differences under temporal context. It is a steady tendency and character of capabilities in time-related situation. In the field of consumer behavior and computer, previous research had employed investigation and field test methods to investigate the features of different temporal distribution disposition. But it has little literature in the field of cognitive control of psychology.In our research, the aim is to investigate the temporal patterns of the brain activity when polychronic and monochronic individuals were performing the conflict and switch task. The present research includes two ERP studies. Study1investigated the behavioral characteristic and the temporal patterns of brain activity of different temporal distribution disposition using a gender word face Stroop task in the view of inhibiting; Study2explored the neural mechanism of temporal distribution personality using the dual valence association task in the view of switching.Study1was a2(Group: polychronicity, monochronicity) x2(Task type: congruent, incongruent) mixed experimental design. The results of ANOVA of repeated measurement showed: in terms of accuracy, participants were slower on incongruent trials (p<.001), in regard to the reaction times (RTs), there was a significant interaction between Task type and Group (p<.01). Investigation of the Group effect in each task type showed that polychronics responded faster to the congruent task type; In the terms of ERP component, the monochronics elicited a relatively larger N170than polychronics irrespective of task type (p<.05), meanwhile, monochronics elicited larger sustained positivity (SP) than polychronics (p<.05).Study2was a2(Group: polychronicity, monochronicity)×2(Task type: compatible, incompatible) mixed experimental design. The results of ANOVA of repeated measurement showed: in terms of accuracy, participants were slower on incompatible blocks relative to compatible blocks (p<.01), on the RTs, compatible blocks showed shorter RTs than incompatible ones (p<.01) and polychronics responded faster than monochronics (p<.05); In the terms of ERP component, a larger N170was elicited in the incompatible condition than that in the compatible condition among the monochronics (p<.005), suggesting that monochronics need to devote more attentional resources in face of the conflict task, as for the LPP component, monochronics showed higher positive amplitudes compared to polychronics (p<.05), indicating the enhanced cognitive control processes of monochronics.To sum up, we drew the following conclusions:(1) In terms of behavioral index, polychronics responded faster than monochronics overall. But in the inhibitory task, polychronics responded faster than monochronics only to the congruent task type;(2) In the inhibitory task, polychronics showed longer latency of N170relative to monochronics, that is monochronics noticed the stimuli earlier at attention stage of the cognitive processing stage;(3) As for the N170, monochronics elicited a relatively larger N170than polychronics overall. But in the switch task, a larger N170was elicited in the incompatible condition than that in the compatible condition among the monochronics, suggesting that monochronics need to devote more attentional resources in face of the conflict task(4) The2studies found consistent results on the late component of cognitive processing. Monochronics elicited larger sustained positivity than polychronics in the inhibitory task and showed higher LPP compared to polychromocs in the switching task, indicating the enhanced cognitive control processes of monochronics.To sum up, our research fully investigated the neural mechanism of the impact of temporal distribution on executive function. It explored the temporal patterns of the brain activity when polychronic and monochronic individuals were performing the cognitive control task in detail. These results further confirmed the stability of personality of temporal distribution, meanwhile it also enriched the research of time personality and found the evidence of neurophysiology. |
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