Objective: To investigate whether Pi (Spleen) qi-deficiency affected psychological and neural responses in relevance to cognitive control.
Methods: Pi qi-deficient and balanced participants were asked to perform the Stroop task, a classical cognitive control paradigm. In this paradigm, participants had to judge the color of the prompted word. The word's meaning indicated the color (the consistent condition) or not (the inconsistent condition), or were unrelated to the color (the neutral condition). Electroencephalograph (EEG) was recorded during the task.
Results: Event-related potential (ERP) results showed that Pi qi-deficient individuals failed to exhibit a normal Stroop effect as Balanced individuals did, such as the accuracy differences between the consistent and the inconsistent conditions as well as the N450 effect (P>0.05). Meanwhile, Pi qi-deficient individuals displayed larger P2 and P3 amplitudes than balanced individuals did during performing the cognitive control task (P<0.05).
Conclusion: Pi qi-deficiency had psychological and neural basis at least in cognitive control aspect.
Keywords: Chinese medicine; Pi (Spleen) qi-deficient individuals; balanced individuals; cognitive control.