Cognitive Control Capacity Research Articles

Rationalizing constraints on the capacity for cognitive control.

Humans are remarkably limited in: (i) how many control-dependent tasks they can execute simultaneously, and (ii) how intensely they can focus on a single task. These limitations are universal assumptions of most theories of cognition. Yet, a rationale for why humans are subject to these constraints remains elusive. This feature review draws on recent insights from psychology, neuroscience, and machine learning, to suggest that constraints on cognitive control may result from a rational adaptation to fundamental, computational dilemmas in neural architectures. The reviewed literature implies that limitations in multitasking may result from a trade-off between learning efficacy and processing efficiency and that limitations in the intensity of commitment to a single task may reflect a trade-off between cognitive stability and flexibility.

A mosaic of cost-benefit control over cortico-striatal circuitry.

Dopamine contributes to cognitive control through well-established effects in both the striatum and cortex. Although earlier work suggests that dopamine affects cognitive control capacity, more recent work suggests that striatal dopamine may also impact on cognitive motivation. We consider the emerging perspective that striatal dopamine boosts control by making people more sensitive to the benefits versus the costs of cognitive effort, and we discuss how this sensitivity shapes competition between controlled and prepotent actions. We propose that dopamine signaling in distinct cortico-striatal subregions mediates different types of cost-benefit tradeoffs, and also discuss mechanisms for the local control of dopamine release, enabling selectivity among cortico-striatal circuits. In so doing, we show how this cost-benefit mosaic can reconcile seemingly conflicting findings about the impact of dopamine signaling on cognitive control.

To Regulate or Not to Regulate: Emotion Regulation in Participants With Low and High Impulsivity.

Successful emotion regulation plays a key role in psychological health and well-being. This study examines (1) whether cognitive control and corresponding neural connectivity are associated with emotion regulation and (2) to what extent external instructions can improve emotion regulation in individuals with low vs. high cognitive control capacity. For this, emotion regulation capabilities and the impact of emotion regulation on a subsequent emotional Stroop task was tested in participants with low (N = 25) vs. high impulsivity (N = 32). The classification according to impulsivity is based upon the stable correlation between high impulsivity and reduced cognitive control capacity. A negative emotion inducing movie scene was presented with the instruction to either suppress or allow all emotions that arose. This was followed by an emotional Stroop task. Electromyography (EMG) over the corrugator supercilii was used to assess the effects of emotion regulation. Neurophysiological mechanisms were measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy over frontal brain areas. While EMG activation was low in the low-impulsive group independent of instruction, high-impulsive participants showed increased EMG activity when they were not explicitly instructed to suppress arising emotions. Given the same extent of functional connectivity within frontal lobe networks, the low-impulsive participants controlled their emotions better (less EMG activation) than the high-impulsive participants. In the Stroop task, the low-impulsive subjects performed significantly better. The emotion regulation condition had no significant effect on the results. We conclude that the cognitive control network is closely associated with emotion regulation capabilities. Individuals with high cognitive control show implicit capabilities for emotion regulation. Individuals with low cognitive control require external instructions (= explicit emotion regulation) to achieve similarly low expressions of emotionality. Implications for clinical applications aiming to improve emotion regulation are discussed.

Adaptive assessment of the capacity of cognitive control.

Cognitive control, although it has limited capacity, serves an essential role in supporting a broad range of cognitive functions. The backward masking majority function task (MFT-M) is a validated behavioural method for measuring the capacity of cognitive control (CCC), but the administration is lengthy. We tested the relative efficiency of administering the MFT-M using an adaptive method based on the principles of computerised adaptive testing (CAT). Participants were 40 healthy young adults aged 18-26. Scores on the adaptive version were highly correlated with scores based on the original approach to administration and showed high test-retest reliability. In addition, compared with the original task of 864 trials (about 86 min), less than 216 trials (20 min) were required in the adaptive version. The results suggest that CAT is a valid and more efficient method for assessing CCC than the MFT-M. This study provides an example of adaptive trial selection in task administration, an approach that can advance the methodology of behavioural science.

Meta-control: From psychology to computational neuroscience.

Research in the past decades shed light on the different mechanisms that underlie our capacity for cognitive control. However, the meta-level processes that regulate cognitive control itself remain poorly understood. Following the terminology from artificial intelligence, meta-control can be defined as a collection of mechanisms that (a) monitor the progress of controlled processing and (b) regulate the underlying control parameters in the service of current task goals and in response to internal or external constraints. From a psychological perspective, meta-control is an important concept because it may help explain and predict how and when human agents select different types of behavioral strategies. From a cognitive neuroscience viewpoint, meta-control is a useful concept for understanding the complex networks in the prefrontal cortex that guide higher-level behavior as well as their interactions with neuromodulatory systems (such as the dopamine or norepinephrine system). The purpose of the special issue is to integrate hitherto segregated strands of research across three different perspectives: 1) a psychological perspective that specifies meta-control processes on a functional level and aims to operationalize them in experimental tasks; 2) a computational perspective that builds on ideas from artificial intelligence to formalize normative solutions to meta-control problems; and 3) a cognitive neuroscience perspective that identifies neural correlates of and mechanisms underlying meta-control.

Neural Signatures of Performance Feedback in the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Task (PASAT): An ERP Study.

Research on cognitive control has sparked increasing interest in recent years, as it is an important prerequisite for goal oriented human behavior. The paced auditory serial addition task (PASAT) has been used to test and train cognitive control functions. This adaptive, challenging task includes continuous performance feedback. Therefore, additional cognitive control capacities are required to process this information along with the already high task-load. The underlying neural mechanisms, however, are still unclear. To explore the neural signatures of the PASAT and particularly the processing of distractive feedback information, feedback locked event-related potentials were derived from 24 healthy participants during an adaptive 2-back version of the PASAT. Larger neural activation after negative feedback was found for feedback related negativity (FRN), P300, and late positive potential (LPP). In early stages of feedback processing (i.e., FRN), a larger difference between positive and negative feedback responses was associated with poorer overall performance. This association was inverted in later stages (i.e., P300 and LPP). Together, our findings indicate stage-dependent associations between neural activation after negative information and cognitive functioning. Conceivably, increased early responses to negative feedback signify distraction, whereas higher activity at later stages reflects cognitive control processes to preserve ongoing performance.

Context-specific abnormalities of the central executive network in first-episode psychosis: relationship with cognition.

Cognitive impairments, which contribute to the profound functional deficits observed in psychotic disorders, have found to be associated with abnormalities in trial-level cognitive control. However, neural tasks operate within the context of sustained cognitive states, which can be assessed with 'background connectivity' following the removal of task effects. To date, little is known about the integrity of brain processes supporting the maintenance of a cognitive state in individuals with psychotic disorders. Thus, here we examine background connectivity during executive processing in a cohort of participants with first-episode psychosis (FEP). The following fMRI study examined background connectivity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), during working memory engagement in a group of 43 patients with FEP, relative to 35 healthy controls (HC). Findings were also examined in relation to measures of executive function. The FEP group relative to HC showed significantly lower background DLPFC connectivity with bilateral superior parietal lobule (SPL) and left inferior parietal lobule. Background connectivity between DLPFC and SPL was also positively associated with overall cognition across all subjects and in our FEP group. In comparison, resting-state frontoparietal connectivity did not differ between groups and was not significantly associated with overall cognition, suggesting that psychosis-related alterations in executive networks only emerged during states of goal-oriented behavior. These results provide novel evidence indicating while frontoparietal connectivity at rest appears intact in psychosis, when engaged during a cognitive state, it is impaired possibly undermining cognitive control capacities in FEP.

Crossmodal metaperception: Visual and tactile confidence share a common scale

Abstract Perceptual decisions are typically accompanied by a subjective sense of (un)certainty. There is robust evidence that observers have access to a reliable estimate of their own uncertainty and can judge the validity of their perceptual decisions. However, there is still a debate to what extent these meta-perceptual judgements underly a common mechanism that can monitor perceptual decisions across different sensory modalities. It has been suggested that perceptual confidence can be evaluated on an abstract scale that is not only task-independent but also modality-independent. We aimed to scrutinize these findings by measuring visual contrast and tactile vibration discrimination thresholds in a confidence forced-choice task. A total of 56 participants took part in our study. We determined thresholds for trials in which perceptual decisions were chosen as confident and for those that were declined as confident. Confidence comparisons were made between perceptual decisions either within the visual and tactile modality, respectively, or across both modalities. Furthermore, we assessed executive functions to explore a possible link between cognitive control and meta-perceptual capacities. We found that perceptual performance was a good predictor of confidence judgments and that the threshold modulation was similarly pronounced in both modalities. Most importantly, participants compared their perceptual confidence across visual and tactile decisions with the same precision as within the same modality. Cognitive control capacities were not related to meta-perceptual performance. In conclusion, our findings corroborate that perceptual uncertainty can be accessed on an abstract scale, allowing for confidence comparisons across sensory modalities.

Heart Rate Variability Moderates the Association Between Beliefs About Worry and Generalized Anxiety Disorder Symptoms.

Paradoxically, some individuals who experience pathological worry also have good capacity for top-down control over their thoughts. Why such individuals would nevertheless worry excessively remains unclear. One explanation is suggested by research showing that those experiencing pathological worry are set apart from healthy controls by their beliefs that worry has utility and that effective worrying requires them to consider all possibilities before terminating a worry bout. This suggests that worriers with good capacity for cognitive control may engage in prolonged worry because they believe it is adaptive to do so. In a sample of 109 college students, among whom individuals reporting pathological worry were overrepresented, we tested this hypothesis using an objective index of top-down control capacity (i.e., resting vagally mediated heart rate variability [vmHRV]) and self-report measures of beliefs about worry and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) symptom severity/status. As predicted, GAD symptom severity and vmHRV interacted to predict beliefs about worry. Specifically, high GAD symptoms were most strongly associated with beliefs that worry has utility at higher levels of vmHRV. Furthermore, this pattern was mostly a function of the belief that worry serves to distract the worrier from more emotional things. Similarly, high GAD symptoms were most strongly associated with endorsement of an ‘as many as can’ (AMAC) problem-solving rule when vmHRV was high. From the opposite perspective, both worry utility beliefs and AMAC rule endorsement were associated with the highest GAD symptom severity at higher levels of vmHRV. This was also true for the belief that worry distracts from more emotional things predicting analog GAD status. These results suggest that worriers who have higher levels of top-down control capacity may initiate and persist in worry, at least initially, because they value it. However, why they nevertheless rate their worry as excessive and uncontrollable is an important question for future research.

The cognitive effects of a promised bonus do not depend on dopamine synthesis capacity

Reward motivation is known to enhance cognitive control. However, detrimental effects have also been observed, which have been attributed to overdosing of already high baseline dopamine levels by further dopamine increases elicited by reward cues. Aarts et al. (2014) indeed demonstrated, in 14 individuals, that reward effects depended on striatal dopamine synthesis capacity, measured with [18F]FMT-PET: promised reward improved Stroop control in low-dopamine individuals, while impairing it in high-dopamine individuals. Here, we aimed to assess this same effect in 44 new participants, who had previously undergone an [18F]DOPA-PET scan to quantify dopamine synthesis capacity. This sample performed the exact same rewarded Stroop paradigm as in the prior study. However, we did not find any correlation between reward effects on cognitive control and striatal dopamine synthesis capacity. Critical differences between the radiotracers [18F]DOPA and [18F]FMT are discussed, as the discrepancy between the current and our previous findings might reflect the use of the potentially less sensitive [18F]DOPA radiotracer in the current study.

A Practical Approach to Imaging of the Supplementary Motor Area and Its Subcortical Connections.

First, an anatomical and functional review of these cortical areas and subcortical connections with T-fMRI and tractography techniques; second, to demonstrate the value of this approach in neurosurgical planning in a series of patients with tumors close to the SMA. Implications in language and cognitive networks with a clear hemispheric lateralization of these SMA/pre-SMA. The recommendation of the use of the advanced neuroimaging studies for surgical planning and preservation of these areas. The SMA/pre-SMA and their subcortical connections are functional areas to be taken into consideration in neurosurgical planning. These areas would be involved in the control/inhibition of movement, in verbal expression and fluency and in tasks of cognitive control capacity. Its preservation is key to the patient's postsurgical cognitive and functional evolution.

Daily Experiences of Commuting Strain and Self-Control at Work and at Home

Abstract. The study investigates how commuting strain affects daily self-control capacities at work and at home. Irritability (i.e., increased readiness to express negative emotions when facing frustration) and concentration (i.e., a cognitive control capacity that relies on attention) were used as indicators of (impaired) self-control. Based on 5-day diary data from N = 185 train commuters, we found that on days with a strenuous ride from home to work, commuters indicated higher irritability and lower concentration capacity at work. On days with higher strain during the work-to-home ride, commuters reported to be more irritable back home. Moreover, commuters with low emotional stability turned out to be more affected by commuting strain but only if considering self-control impairment at home.

Evidence for Hierarchical Cognitive Control in the Human Cerebellum.

In non-habitual situations, cognitive control aligns actions with both short- and long-term goals. The capacity for cognitive control is tightly tied to the prefrontal cortex, whose expansion in humans relative to other species is thought to support our superior cognitive control. However, the posterolateral cerebellum has also expanded greatly relative to non-human primates and has an organizational structure that mirrors the prefrontal cortex. Nevertheless, cerebellar contributions to cognitive control are poorly understood. Here, we sought to explore whether a functional hierarchical processing framework, applied to the cerebellum, could elucidate cerebellar contributions to cognitive control. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we show that a gradient within the posterolateral cerebellum supports cognitive control with motor-adjacent cerebellar sub-regions supporting control of concrete, proximal actions and motor-distal, cerebellar sub-regions supporting abstract, future processing. This gradient was functionally hierarchical, with regions higher in the hierarchy influencing the relationship between regions lower in the hierarchy. This functional hierarchy provides the infrastructure by which context can inform current actions and prepare for future goals. Crucially, this mirrors the hierarchical organization of cognitive control within the prefrontal cortex. Based on these findings, we propose that the cerebellum contains within itself a parallel but separate hierarchical organization that, along with the prefrontal cortex, supports complex cognition.

Capacity of cognitive control in patients with cerebral small vessel disease

Objective To evaluate the capacity of cognitive control(CCC) in patients with cerebral small vessel disease(CSVD) and explore the relationship between CCC and cognitive function in CSVD, and to assess the predict value of CCC on the occurrence of CSVD. Methods Twenty-two patients with CSVD and twenty-three healthy controls were enrolled.All of them completed the majority function task-masked (MFT-M) and a set of neuropsychological tests.Neuropsychological test was performed by Montreal cognitive assessment (MoCA), verbal fluency test (VFT), Chinese auditory learning test (CAVLT), symbol digit modalities test (SDMT), digital span (DS), Stroop color word test (SCWT), color trail test (CTT) and Modified Boston naming test (Modified BNT). The predict value of CCC for the occurrence of CSVD was assessed with logistic regression analysis. Results CCC of patients with CSVD was lower than that of healthy control ((2.97±0.72)bps vs (3.53±0.62)bps, t=-2.704, P=0.01). Between patients with CSVD and healthy control, there were significant differences in MoCA ((22.24±4.58 vs (24.86±2.42), t=-2.334, P=0.026), VFT-animal (12(6) vs 15(6), Z=-2.965, P=0.003), VFT-vegetables and fruits ((13.79±3.81) vs (18.27±4.13), t=-3.592, P=0.001), CAVLT-immediate ((7.45±2.18) vs (9.11±2.08), t=-2.502, P=0.017), CAVLT-short term delay ((7.20±3.32) vs (10.76±3.08), t=-3.564, P=0.001), CAVLT-long term delay ((7.30±3.16) vs (10.29±3.18), t=-3.012, P=0.005), SDMT ((15.95±5.49) vs (23.41±12.73), t=-2.513, P=0.018), CTT-A (85.17(42.60) vs 55.50(52.65), Z=-2.965, P=0.003), CTT-B ((200.69±71.35) vs (132.44±53.66), t=3.556, P=0.001), and CTT-B-A ((104.13±53.31) vs (65.20±35.98), t=2.819, P=0.007). But there was no significant difference in VFT-word begin with Chinese characterwater((3.68±2.63) vs (5.44±2.71), t=-1.940, P=0.061), CAVLT-recognition (14(3) vs 14(4), Z=-0.524, P=0.601), DS-forward (7.0(3.0) vs 5.5(2.0), Z=-0.152, P=0.880), DS-backward (4(1) vs 4(2), Z=-1.044, P=0.297), SCWT ((9.50±9.28) vs (5.94±10.47), t=1.123, P=0.268), Modified BNT (14.0(3.0) vs 13.5(3.0), Z=-0.727, P=0.467) between CSVD patients and healthy controls.In patients with CSVD, CCC was positively correlated with scores of MoCA (r=0.551, P=0.010) and also with DS-forward (r=0.532, P=0.013) and SCWT (r=-0.487, P=0.040). Logistic regression analysis showed that CCC was an important variable in predicting the possibility of CSVD (B=-1.318, P=0.019, OR=0.268, 95%CI (0.089-0.808)). Conclusion Compared with the healthy control, CCC in patients with CSVD decreases significantly and CCC is related to the cognitive impairment.CCC can predict the possibility of CSVD. Key words: Cognitive control capacity; Cerebral small vessel disease; Cognitive function

Accessing the development and heritability of the capacity of cognitive control

Cognitive control serves as a core construct, with limited capacity, to support executive functions and other higher-level mental processes such as intellectual activity. Although previous studies have investigated the development of executive functions during specific age periods, the development of the capacity of cognitive control (CCC) from early childhood to late adolescence and the heritability of the CCC have yet to be delineated. In this study, we estimated the CCC based on the performance of a perceptual decision-making task in monozygotic (n = 95) and dizygotic (n = 81) twin pairs with an age range from 6 to 18 years and in a reference young adult group (n = 41, mean age = 26.15 years). In addition, the intelligence quotient (IQ) of these participants was assessed using the Wechsler Intelligence Scales. We found an increase in the CCC from 1.55 bits per second (bps) at age 6 years to its 95% capacity of 3.87 bps at age 21 years, with a reduced growth rate as a function of age. The estimated heritability of the CCC was 0.66, and shared and non-shared environmental influences on the CCC were 0.18 and 0.16, respectively. The CCC was significantly correlated to IQ (r = 0.34). These findings indicate that the CCC is developed throughout the school years, is highly heritable, and is associated with higher-level cognition.

The contribution of maternal executive functions and active coping to dyadic affective dynamics: Children with autism spectrum disorder and their mothers.

Parenting is a cognitive, emotional, and behavioral endeavor, where parents' control capacities, including executive functions and active control coping, help parents to guide and regulate interactions with their children; yet limited research investigates how these capacities are associated with parent-child affective regulation processes during parent-child interactions. This study examined whether maternal executive functions (sustained attention, interference inhibitory control, working memory) and active engaged coping were related to dyadic affective flexibility and positive mutual affective interactions between mothers and their young children with autism spectrum disorders (N = 40). Dyadic flexibility and mutual positive affect were measured using dynamic systems-based modeling of second-by-second affective patterns during a mother-child interaction. The results showed that higher levels of maternal sustained attention and inhibitory control were related to increased dyadic affective flexibility. In addition, higher levels of maternal sustained attention and higher use of engaged coping were related to dyadic mutual positive affect. The findings highlight the importance of maternal cognitive control capacity in promoting adaptive parent-child dyadic regulatory processes.

Thalamic GABA may modulate cognitive control in restless legs syndrome

The restless legs syndrome (RLS) has repeatedly, but not exclusively, been associated with functional thalamic changes as well as changes in GABAergic neurotransmission. This has been linked to the well-known sensory-motor symptoms, but it has never been investigated whether those factors also account for potential cognitive changes in RLS, even though they are known to play an important role for cognitive control. To investigate the potential relationship between thalamic GABA concentrations and cognitive control in n = 25 RLS patients; a neuropsychological experimental paradigm was used in combination with magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS). Compared to n = 31 healthy controls, RLS patients displayed reduced cognitive control capacities, which were most likely based on working memory deficits. On the neurobiochemical level, (relatively) elevated thalamic GABA levels attenuated control deficits only in the RLS group, even though there were no group differences with respect to overall GABA levels. Given that RLS patients are known to display thalamic hyperactivity and associated thalamic hypoconnectivity, (relatively) higher GABA levels may have helped RLS patients to “compensate” for this pathological factor. Our findings specify the functional relevance of thalamic GABAergic neurotransmission for cognition in RLS, even though changes in GABAergic neurotransmission might not be the ultimate cause of control deficits.

Reduced Capacity of Cognitive Control in Older Adults with Mild Cognitive Impairment

Cognitive control for the coordination of mental operations is essential in normal cognitive functioning of daily life. Although the decline of cognitive control in older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) has been demonstrated, whether this decline is a core deficit in MCI remains unclear. In this study, we employed a perceptual decision-making task to estimate the capacity of cognitive control (CCC) in older adults with MCI (n = 55) and the age-, sex-, and education-matched healthy controls (HC, n = 55) selected based on a commonly used battery of ten neuropsychological tests in five cognitive domains. We found that the CCC was significantly correlated to the neuropsychological measures of the battery. The mean CCC was significantly lower in the MCI group (3.06 bps) than in the HC group (3.59 bps) and significantly lower in the amnestic MCI subgroup (2.90 bps) than in the nonamnestic MCI subgroup (3.22 bps). In detecting and classifying MCI using machine learning, the classifier with the CCC as the input feature outperformed the overall classification with neuropsychological measures in a single cognitive domain. The classification performance was significantly increased when the CCC was included as a feature in addition to measures in a single domain, and the CCC served as a key feature in optimal classifiers with inputs from multiple domains. These results support the hypothesis that the decline in cognitive control is a core deficit in MCI and suggest that the CCC may serve as a key index in the diagnosis of MCI.

Individual differences in parietal and frontal cortex structure predict dissociable capacities for perception and cognitive control

Capacity limits in perception can lead to failures of awareness in situations that overload capacity, resulting in various phenomena of ‘inattentional blindness’. In contrast, capacity limits in cognitive control over attention by working memory lead to increased processing of irrelevant distractors (reduced inattentional blindness). Here, using Voxel-Based Morphometry combined with Principal Components Analysis, we establish distinct brain-structural correlates of perceptual capacity, dissociable from those of cognitive control. Perceptual capacity was measured as the principal component accounting for variance across tasks of multiple object tracking, change blindness and rapid visual enumeration (i.e. ‘subitizing’). Cognitive control capacity was measured as the principal component underlying performance of three different complex working memory span tasks (involving spatial, semantic and numerical domains). Volumetric differences in the right Inferior Parietal Lobule (IPL) were predictive of individual differences in perceptual capacity, while volumetric differences in left Middle Frontal Gyrus (MFG) (as well as lateral frontal and posterior cingulate cortex in a non-parametric analysis) were predictive of individual differences in cognitive control capacity. IPL remained a significant predictor of perceptual capacity when controlling for variance accounted for by cognitive control capacity and vice versa for the neural correlates of cognitive control. These results suggest that perceptual and cognitive control capacities represent dissociable and lasting, trait-like attributes which can be predicted from distinct signatures in regional grey matter.

Dysfunctional cognitive control and reward processing in adolescents with Internet gaming disorder.

Developmental theories posit that immature cognitive control and excessive reward-seeking capacities may be a risk factor for addictive behaviors during adolescence, but the control and reward capacities have rarely been assessed experimentally in adolescents with Internet gaming disorder (IGD) simultaneously. This electrophysiological study examined inhibitory control and reward processing in adolescents with IGD during a go/no-go task and a gambling task. Behaviorally, the adolescents with IGD exhibited lower inhibitory control, as measured by the accuracy of no-go trials, and more risk seeking, as measured by the proportion of risky choices, than did the controls. Compared with the controls, the adolescents with IGD exhibited decreased no-go P3 and blunted feedback-related negativity (FRN) amplitudes following gains (gain FRN) but not losses. Thus, IGD in adolescents is potentially driven by dysfunction of the control system and the approach system rather than the avoidance system, supporting the neurobiological model of adolescent development.