Citation

Schmidt B, Kessler L, Holroyd CB, Miltner WHR. Psychophysiology 2019; 56(12): e13458.

Affiliation

Institute of Psychology, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Jena, Germany.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, Society for Psychophysiological Research, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/psyp.13458

PMID

31410847

Abstract

A recent study claims that participants wearing a bike helmet behave riskier in a computer-based risk task compared to control participants without a bike helmet. We hypothesized that wearing a bike helmet reduces cognitive control over risky behavior. To test our hypothesis, we recorded participants' EEG brain responses while they played a risk game developed in our laboratory. Previously, we found that, in this risk game, anxious participants showed greater levels of cognitive control as revealed by greater frontal midline theta power, which was associated with less risky decisions. Here, we predicted that cognitive control would be reduced in the helmet group, indicated by reduced frontal midline theta power, and that this group would prefer riskier options in the risk game. In line with our hypothesis, we found that participants in the helmet group showed significantly lower frontal midline theta power than participants in the control group, indicating less cognitive control. We did not replicate the finding of generally riskier behavior in the helmet group. Instead, we found that participants chose the riskier option in about half of trials, no matter how risky the other option was. Our results suggest that wearing a bike helmet reduces cognitive control, as revealed by reduced frontal midline theta power, leading to risk indifference when evaluating potential behaviors.

© 2019 The Authors. Psychophysiology published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Society for Psychophysiological Research.

Language: en

Keywords

EEG; cognitive control; frontal midline theta; helmet; risk behavior