Abstract
Cognitive control refers to the processes that permit selection and prioritization of information processing in different cognitive domains to reach the capacity-limited conscious mind. Although previous studies have suggested that the capacity of cognitive control itself is limited, a direct quantification of this capacity has not been attempted. In this behavioral study, we manipulated the information rate of cognitive control by parametrically varying both the uncertainty of stimul measured as information entropy and the exposure time of the stimuli. We used the relationship between the participants’ response accuracy and the information rate of cognitive control (in bits per second, bps) in the model fitting to estimate the capacity of cognitive control. We found that the capacity of cognitive control was approximately 3 to 4 bps, demonstrating that cognitive control as a higher-level function has a remarkably low capacity. This quantification of the capacity of cognitive control may have significant theoretical and clinical implications.
Highlights
The human brain processes a multitude of information in multiple cognitive domains under time constraints
The uncertainty of information is quantified as the information entropy in unit of bits for a given channel, and the information rate is the average amount of information transmitted per unit of time
We found that the response accuracy was approximately perfect in the three congruent conditions (1:0, 3:0, and 5:0) across all exposure time (ET), but declined as a function of entropy and the reciprocal of ET, and dropped towards chance level as the information rate increased in incongruent conditions (2:1, 4:1, and 3:2) (Fig. 4a)
Summary
The human brain processes a multitude of information in multiple cognitive domains under time constraints. Quantification of the CCC, even in a domain such as perceptual decision-making as a specific case, may advance our understanding of the mechanisms and upper-bound limit of cognitive control. Information theory[12] provides a theoretical and mathematical framework for the quantification of cognitive processes[1,13,14,15,16] Under this framework, the uncertainty of information is quantified as the information entropy in unit of bits for a given channel, and the information rate is the average amount of information transmitted per unit of time. We parametrically manipulated the rate of information processing that requires cognitive control within a wide range to assess participants’ performance when the CCC is challenged to varying degrees. The MFT requires the process of reconciling conflicting information, which is a psychological property of the flanker task, but with greater engagement of cognitive control to coordinate mental operations for perceptual information processing and decision-making. By fitting a model with predicted accuracy as a function of CCC to empirical behavioral performance in terms of accuracy, we could obtain an optimized CCC value as the estimate of the CCC
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