Role Of Cognitive Control Research Articles

Patterns of Focal- and Large-Scale Synchronization in Cognitive Control and Inhibition: A Review.

Neural synchronization patterns are involved in several complex cognitive functions and constitute a growing trend in neuroscience research. While synchrony patterns in working memory have been extensively discussed, a complete understanding of their role in cognitive control and inhibition is still elusive. Here, we provide an up-to-date review on synchronization patterns underlying behavioral inhibition, extrapolating common grounds, and dissociating features with other inhibitory functions. Moreover, we suggest a schematic conceptual framework and highlight existing gaps in the literature, current methodological challenges, and compelling research questions for future studies.

Creativity on tap 2: Investigating dose effects of alcohol on cognitive control and creative cognition.

This preregistered study aimed to replicate and extend research on the role of cognitive control in creative cognition by examining dose effects of alcohol in a randomized controlled trial. A sample of 125 participants was randomly assigned to three experimental groups, either drinking alcoholic beer (BAC=0.03 or 0.06) or drinking non-alcoholic beer (placebo-control group). Before and after the alcohol intervention, participants completed two tests of cognitive control and two established creative thinking tasks. A BAC of 0.06 led to an impairment of verbal fluency, while working memory performance was unaffected at both alcohol levels. Alcohol had no facilitative or detrimental effects on creative thinking performance, neither in terms of RAT performance, divergent thinking fluency or divergent thinking creativity. These results indicate that moderate alcohol levels have dose-dependent, selective effects on cognitive control, and that minor impairments of cognitive control do not generally increase or attenuate creative thinking performance.

Auditory Sentence Processing in Bilinguals: The Role of Cognitive Control.

A number of research studies have shown that the unique need in bilinguals to manage both of their languages positively impacts their cognitive control processes. Yet, due to a dearth of studies at the sentence level, it is still unclear if this benefit extends to sentence processing. In monolinguals and bilinguals, cognitive control helps in reinterpretation of garden path sentences but it is still unknown how it supports the real-time resolution of interference during parsing, such as the type of interference seen in the processing of object relative (OR) sentences. In this study, we compared monolinguals and bilinguals during online spoken OR sentence processing and examined if both groups used cognitive control to resolve interference. In this eye-tracking visual world (ETL-vw) study, OR sentences were aurally presented to 19 monolingual and 21 Spanish-English bilingual adults while gaze patterns were captured throughout the time course of the sentence. Of particular interest was the post-verb position, where the listener connects the verb to its direct object. In OR constructions (e.g., “The man that the boy pushes__ has a red shirt.”), the verb (‘pushes’) links to its syntactically licensed direct object (‘the man’) at verb offset. During syntactic linking, the parser crosses over an intervening noun phrase (NP, ‘the boy’) and the two NP activations create interference. The nature of this paradigm allows us to measure interference and its resolution between the intervening NP and the displaced object in real-time. By relating sentence processing patterns with cognitive control measures, high- and no- conflict N-Back tasks, we investigated group differences in the use of cognitive control during sentence processing. Overall, bilinguals showed less interference than monolinguals from the intervening NP during the real time processing of OR sentences. This interference effect and its resolution was significantly predicted by cognitive control skills for bilingual, but not monolingual listeners. This enhanced effect in bilinguals extends previous findings of interference resolution to real time spoken sentence processing suggesting that bilinguals are more efficient than monolinguals at managing interference during complex sentence processing.

Spatiotemporal Integrity and Spontaneous Nonlinear Dynamic Properties of the Salience Network Revealed by Human Intracranial Electrophysiology: A Multicohort Replication.

The salience network (SN) plays a critical role in cognitive control and adaptive human behaviors, but its electrophysiological foundations and millisecond timescale dynamic temporal properties are poorly understood. Here, we use invasive intracranial EEG (iEEG) from multiple cohorts to investigate the neurophysiological underpinnings of the SN and identify dynamic temporal properties that distinguish it from the default mode network (DMN) and dorsolateral frontal-parietal network (FPN), two other large-scale brain networks that play important roles in human cognition. iEEG analysis of network interactions revealed that the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex, which together anchor the SN, had stronger intranetwork interactions with each other than cross-network interactions with the DMN and FPN. Analysis of directionality of information flow between the SN, DMN, and FPN revealed causal outflow hubs in the SN consistent with its role in fast temporal switching of network interactions. Analysis of regional iEEG temporal fluctuations revealed faster temporal dynamics and higher entropy of neural activity within the SN, compared to the DMN and FPN. Critically, these results were replicated across multiple cohorts. Our findings provide new insights into the neurophysiological basis of the SN, and more broadly, foundational mechanisms underlying the large-scale functional organization of the human brain.

A Domain-General Cognitive Core Defined in Multimodally Parcellated Human Cortex.

Numerous brain imaging studies identified a domain-general or “multiple-demand” (MD) activation pattern accompanying many tasks and may play a core role in cognitive control. Though this finding is well established, the limited spatial localization provided by traditional imaging methods precluded a consensus regarding the precise anatomy, functional differentiation, and connectivity of the MD system. To address these limitations, we used data from 449 subjects from the Human Connectome Project, with the cortex of each individual parcellated using neurobiologically grounded multimodal MRI features. The conjunction of three cognitive contrasts reveals a core of 10 widely distributed MD parcels per hemisphere that are most strongly activated and functionally interconnected, surrounded by a penumbra of 17 additional areas. Outside cerebral cortex, MD activation is most prominent in the caudate and cerebellum. Comparison with canonical resting-state networks shows MD regions concentrated in the fronto-parietal network but also engaging three other networks. MD activations show modest relative task preferences accompanying strong co-recruitment. With distributed anatomical organization, mosaic functional preferences, and strong interconnectivity, we suggest MD regions are well positioned to integrate and assemble the diverse components of cognitive operations. Our precise delineation of MD regions provides a basis for refined analyses of their functions.

Neural Correlates of Reinforcement Learning in Mid-lateral Cerebellum

The role of the cerebellum in non-motor learning is poorly understood. Here, we investigated the activity of Purkinje cells (P-cells) in the mid-lateral cerebellum as the monkey learned to associate one arbitrary symbol with the movement of the left hand and another with the movement of the right hand. During learning, but not when the monkey had learned the association, the simple spike responses of P-cells reported the outcome of the animal's most recent decision without concomitant changes in other sensorimotor parameters such as hand movement, licking, or eye movement. At the population level, P-cells collectively maintained a memory of the most recent decision throughout the entire trial. As the monkeys learned the association, the magnitude of this reward-related error signal approached zero. Our results provide a major departure from the current understanding of cerebellar processing and have critical implications for cerebellum's role in cognitive control.

Neuroscience on Cognitive Control of Behavior: Functional Division among Prefrontal Areas

The prefrontal cortex is greatly developed in primates and is considered to play an important role in cognitive control of behavior. In the visual and motor systems, research into the functional division between cortical areas has advanced. The prefrontal cortex has also been shown to be divided into several areas which have different anatomical connections with other brain sites. However, the functional division among prefrontal cortical areas has been less well studied. Knowledge of the functional division is expected to help in understanding the cognitive control of complex behaviors in terms of more elementary processes.

Cognitive control depletion reduces pre-stimulus and recollection-related measures of strategic retrieval.

Background: The ability to strategically retrieve task-relevant information from episodic memory is thought to rely on goal-directed executive processes, and there is evidence that neural correlates of strategic retrieval are sensitive to reserves of cognitive control. The present study extended this work, exploring the role of cognitive control in the flexible orienting of strategic retrieval processes across alternating retrieval goals. Method: Pre-stimulus cues directed participants to endorse memory targets from one of two encoding contexts, with the target encoding context alternating every two trials. Items from the nontarget encoding context were rejected alongside new items. One group of participants completed a Stroop task prior to the memory test in order to deplete their reserves of cognitive control, while a second group performed a control task. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded throughout the memory task, and time-locked to both pre-stimulus cues and memory probes. Results: Control participants' pre-stimulus ERPs showed sustained divergences at frontal electrode sites according to retrieval goal. This effect was evident on the first trial of each memory task, and linked with the initiation of goal-specific retrieval orientations. Control participants also showed enhanced ERP correlates of recollection (the 'left parietal effect') for correctly classified targets relative to nontargets on the second trial of each memory task, indexing strategic retrieval of task-relevant information. Both the pre-stimulus index of retrieval orientation and the target/nontarget left parietal effect were significantly attenuated in participants that completed the Stroop task. Conclusions: The reduction of pre-stimulus and stimulus-locked ERP effects following the Stroop task indicates that available reserves of cognitive control play an important role in both proactive and recollection-related aspects of strategic retrieval.

Affect and control: A conceptual clarification

Converging evidence seems to suggest that affect and cognitive control are related in interesting ways, and some researchers have suggested that affect may play a causal, or at least otherwise interesting role in cognitive control. Here I discuss reasons to believe that these claims are either unfounded or based on a conceptual misunderstanding. They are unfounded with respect to the role of conscious affective experience, which is not supported by any unequivocal evidence. And they are based on a conceptual misunderstanding with respect to unconscious affect: Given the strong conceptual overlap between affect on the one hand and cognitive control on the other, finding mechanisms that are shared by affect and control is an almost necessary outcome that does not provide any mechanistic insight but merely reflects the semantic overlap between the concepts. However, this overlap may be taken to expand our research perspective and take affect-related and control-related outcomes as equivalent markers of one underlying function that encompasses, and thus goes beyond the traditional concept of affect and control.

Resting state functional connectivity and cognitive task-related activation of the human claustrum

Structural and functional analyses of the human claustrum, a poorly understood telencephalic gray matter structure, are hampered by its sheet-like anatomical arrangement. Here, we first describe a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) method to reveal claustrum signal with no linear relationship with adjacent regions in human subjects. We applied this approach to resting state functional connectivity (RSFC) analysis of the claustrum at high resolution (1.5 mm isotropic voxels) using a 7T dataset (n = 20) and a separate 3T dataset for replication (n = 35). We then assessed claustrum activation during performance of a cognitive task, the multi-source interference task, at 3T (n = 33). Extensive functional connectivity was observed between claustrum and cortical regions associated with cognitive control, including anterior cingulate, prefrontal and parietal cortices. Cognitive task performance was associated with widespread activation and deactivation that overlapped with the cortical areas showing functional connectivity to the claustrum. Furthermore, during high cognitive conflict conditions of the task, the claustrum was significantly activated at the onset of the task, but not during the remainder of the difficult condition. Both of these findings suggest that the human claustrum can be functionally isolated with fMRI, and that it may play a role in cognitive control, and specifically task switching, independent of sensorimotor processing.

Loss of Hierarchical Control by Occasion Setters Following Lesions of the Prelimbic and Infralimbic Medial Prefrontal Cortex in Rats.

Recent work suggests complementary roles of the prelimbic and infralimbic regions of the rat medial prefrontal cortex in cognitive control processes, with the prelimbic cortex implicated in top-down modulation of associations and the infralimbic cortex playing a role in the inhibition of inappropriate responses. Following selective lesions made to prelimbic or infralimbic regions (or control sham-surgery) rats received simultaneous training on Pavlovian feature negative (A+, XA−) and feature positive (B−, YB+) discriminations designed to lead to hierarchical occasion-setting control by the features (X, Y) over their respective targets (A, B). Evidence for hierarchical control was assessed in a transfer test in which features and targets were swapped (YA, XB). All groups were able to learn the feature negative and feature positive discriminations. Whilst sham-lesioned animals showed no transfer of control by features to novel targets (a hallmark of hierarchical control), rats with lesions of prelimbic or infralimbic regions showed evidence of transfer from the positive feature (Y) to the negative target (A), and from the negative feature (X) to the positive target (B; although this only achieved significance in infralimbic-lesioned animals). These data indicate that damage to either of these regions disrupts hierarchical occasion-setting control, extending our knowledge of their role in cognitive control to encompass flexible behaviours dictated by discrete cues.

The role of cognitive control in third-party punishment

The role of cognitive control in third-party punishment

Cognitive profiles of fluent and non-fluent aphasia with the Russian version of Oxford Cognitive Screen

Event Abstract Back to Event Cognitive profiles of fluent and non-fluent aphasia with the Russian version of Oxford Cognitive Screen Maria Shendyapina1* and Brendan S. Weekes1 1 The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, SAR China Post-stroke aphasia reflects cognitive deficits to memory or executive functions (Kuzmina & Weekes, 2017) as well as language impairments. It was also known that stroke cognitive profiles reflect the integrity of language functions and can serve as a criteria for the prognosis of rehabilitation (Yeung & Law, 2010). Following results of Kuzmina and Weekes (2107), we compared cognitive deficits in patients who have fluent and non-fluent aphasia. In this present study we used the Russian version of the Oxford Cognitive Screen (Rus-OCS; see Shendyapina et al., 2019) which is more potent (shorter) than the Birmingham Cognitive Screen used by Kuzmina and Weekes (2017). Procedure. 25 individuals with fluent aphasia (58.65±16.26 years old, 10 females) and 23 patients with non-fluent aphasia (62.84±13.69 years old, 7 females) were assessed with the Rus-OCS and Russian version of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (Rus-MoCA). Scores on subtests of attention, memory, praxis, language and number processing domains were recorded. The Kruskal-Wallis test was applied to examine differences between performance of both groups. Results. Both groups had significant impairments in verbal functions, although they differed in subtests of reading, verbal recall, verbal recognition and episodic memory wherein patients with nonfluent aphasia were significantly more impaired in the subtest performance (p < 0.05). Conclusions. Using the newly validated Rus-OCS, we identified an impairment to episodic memory and verbal functions in Russian speakers with non-fluent aphasia. These findings add to previous reports of the dissociations in cognitive impairment following brain damage for fluent and nonfluent patients with aphasia and in particular show the relevance of (brief) cognitive testing in the assessment of language impairments post-stroke. Theoretical implications will be discussed. References Kuzmina, E., & Weekes, B. S. (2017). Role of cognitive control in language deficits in different types of aphasia. Aphasiology, 31(7), 765-792. Shendyapina, M., Kuzmina, E., Kazymaev, S., Petrova, A., Demeyere, N., & Weekes, B. S. (2019). The Russian version of the Oxford Cognitive Screen: Validation study on stroke survivors. Neuropsychology, 33(1), 77. Yeung, O., & Law, S.-P. (2010). Executive functions and aphasia treatment outcomes: Data from ortho-phonological cueing therapy for anomia in Chinese. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 12, 529–544. Keywords: cognitive assessment, fluent aphasia, non-fluent aphasia, Oxford Cognitive Screen, cognitive profile, episodic memory Conference: Academy of Aphasia 57th Annual Meeting, Macau, Macao, SAR China, 27 Oct - 29 Oct, 2019. Presentation Type: Poster presentation Topic: Eligible for student award Citation: Shendyapina M and Weekes BS (2019). Cognitive profiles of fluent and non-fluent aphasia with the Russian version of Oxford Cognitive Screen. Front. Hum. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: Academy of Aphasia 57th Annual Meeting. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2019.01.00038 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 29 Apr 2019; Published Online: 09 Oct 2019. * Correspondence: Ms. Maria Shendyapina, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong, SAR China, mshend@hku.hk Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Maria Shendyapina Brendan S Weekes Google Maria Shendyapina Brendan S Weekes Google Scholar Maria Shendyapina Brendan S Weekes PubMed Maria Shendyapina Brendan S Weekes Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Predictive coding and adaptive behavior in patients with genetically determined cerebellar ataxia--A neurophysiology study.

Genetically determined cerebellar ataxias (CA) are a heterogeneous group of disorders with progressive decline of cerebellar functions. The cerebellum influences internal forward models that play a role in cognitive control, but whether these processes are dysfunctional in CA is unclear. Here, we examined sensory predictive coding processes and response adaptation in CA and healthy controls (HC) using behavioral tests with concomitant EEG recordings. N = 23 patients and N = 29 age- and sex-matched HC were studied. Sensory prediction coding was tested with an auditory distraction paradigm and error-related behavioral adaptation with a visual flanker task. As neurophysiological markers we studied different event-related potentials: the P3a for orientation of attention; the N2 and the error-related negativity (ERN) for cognitive adaptation processes/consequences of response errors; error-related positivity (Pe) for error-awareness; the mismatch negativity (MMN) for sensory predictive coding; and reorientation negativity (RON) for reorientation after unexpected events. Overall reaction times were slower in patients compared to HC, but error rates did not differ. Both in patients and HC, P3a amplitudes were larger in distraction trials, but the P3a amplitude was smaller in patients compared to HC. The MMN as well as behavioral and EEG-correlates of response adaptation (ERN/N2) did not differ between groups, while the Pe was attenuated in patients. During sensory predictive coding, RON amplitudes were significantly larger in HC compared to patients. In HC, but not in patients, RON amplitudes were also larger in deviant compared to frequent trials. Processes generating internal forward models are largely intact in genetically determined CA, whereas updating of mental models and error awareness are disturbed in these patients.

The Role of Cognitive Control in Tinnitus and Its Relation to Speech-in-Noise Performance.

Self-reported difficulties in speech-in-noise (SiN) recognition are common among tinnitus patients. Whereas hearing impairment that usually co-occurs with tinnitus can explain such difficulties, recent studies suggest that tinnitus patients with normal hearing sensitivity still show decreased SiN understanding, indicating that SiN difficulties cannot be solely attributed to changes in hearing sensitivity. In fact, cognitive control, which refers to a variety of top-down processes that human beings use to complete their daily tasks, has been shown to be critical for SiN recognition, as well as the key to understand cognitive inefficiencies caused by tinnitus. In this article, we review studies investigating the association between tinnitus and cognitive control using behavioral and brain imaging assessments, as well as those examining the effect of tinnitus on SiN recognition. In addition, three factors that can affect cognitive control in tinnitus patients, including hearing sensitivity, age, and severity of tinnitus, are discussed to elucidate the association among tinnitus, cognitive control, and SiN recognition. Although a possible central or cognitive involvement has always been postulated in the observed SiN impairments in tinnitus patients, there is as yet no direct evidence to underpin this assumption, as few studies have addressed both SiN performance and cognitive control in one tinnitus cohort. Future studies should aim at incorporating SiN tests with various subjective and objective methods that evaluate cognitive performance to better understand the relationship between SiN difficulties and cognitive control in tinnitus patients.

Ventrolateral but not Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex tDCS effectively impact emotion reappraisal \u2013 effects on Emotional Experience and Interbeat Interval

Emotions can be understood as behavioral, physiological, and subjective individual’s alteration due to a given situation. Several times, an efficient regulation of these emotions can promote psychological and social survival. It has been demonstrated that the Prefrontal Cortex (PFC) presents a relevant role in cognitive control, especially during emotion regulation strategies. However, evidence for the role of the PFC and emotional regulation comes mostly from neuroimaging experiments lacking from causal information. Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) has been shown to be an efficient noninvasive neuromodulation technique capable to address causal hypothesis. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of two regions of the PFC (Dorsolateral and Ventrolateral region) on different strategies of emotional reappraisal during the observation of negative images. 180 undergraduate students (mean age 21,75 ± 3,38) participated in this study, divided in two experiments (Dorsolateral PFC - n = 90; Ventrolateral PFC - n = 90). As not expected, DLPFC tDCS did not modulate the responses on the emotional regulation task. However, VLPFC tDCS resulted in less negative valence of negative images as well as decreased cardiac interbeat interval on earlier moments of emotional processing. These findings supports the general view about the role of the PFC on emotional regulation and, at the same time, advances the field by providing evidence that evaluation of negative stimuli is much more based on the VLPFC than on the DLPCF.

General intelligence is associated with working memory-related brain activity: new evidence from a large sample study.

Psychometric intelligence is closely related to working memory capacity. Here we aim to determine the associations of neural activation patterns during the N-back working memory paradigm with psychometric intelligence and working memory performance. We solved the statistical problems of previous studies using (1) a large cohort of 1235 young adults and (2) robust voxel-by-voxel permutation-based statistics at the whole-brain level. Many of the significant correlations were weak, and our findings were not consistent with those of previous studies. We observed that many of the significant correlations involved brain areas in the periphery or boundaries between the task-positive network (TPN) and task-negative network (TNN), suggesting that the expansion of the TPN or TNN is associated with greater cognitive ability. Lower activity in TPN and less task-induced deactivation (TID) in TNN were associated with greater cognitive ability. These findings indicate that subjects with greater cognitive ability have a lower brain response to task demand, consistent with the notion that TID in TNN reflects cognitive demand but partly inconsistent with the prevailing neural efficiency theory. One exception was the pre-supplementary motor area, which plays a key role in cognitive control and sequential processing. In this area, intelligent subjects demonstrated greater activity related to working memory, suggesting that the pre-supplementary motor area plays a unique role in the execution of working memory tasks in intelligent subjects.

The nature of first and second language processing: The role of cognitive control and L2 proficiency during text-level comprehension

Text comprehension relies on high-level cognitive processes as it is the ability to revise an erroneous inference. Recent models of language processing hold that native language processing is proactive in nature (highly predictive), whereas processing seems to be weaker in the second language. However, if a prediction fails because unexpected information is encountered, reactive processing is needed to revise previous information. Twenty-four highly proficient late bilinguals were presented with narratives in L1-English and L2-Spanish. Each text demanded the revision of an initial predictive inference. Reading times and N400 amplitude suggested inferential revision is less efficient in the L2 compared to the L1. Importantly, these effects were modulated by individual differences in cognitive control and L2 proficiency. More efficient L1 comprehension was related to a balance between proactive and reactive control and lower L2 proficiency, whereas more native-like L2 comprehension was associated with a strong proactive control and higher L2 proficiency.

The Role of Cognitive Control in the Self-Regulation and Reinforcement of Smoking Behavior.

There is substantial evidence that CC contributes to self-regulation (ie, brake pedal) and reinforcement (ie, gas pedal) of smoking behavior as well as evidence that long-term smoking may cause reduced CC. The proposed model delineates how these opposing influences of CC may mask the unique contribution of self-regulation and reinforcement in maintaining smoking behavior. Targeting CC for treating nicotine dependence will require more nuanced approaches that consider the independent and combined effects of self-regulation and reinforcement to improve smoking cessation success rates.

Are precues effective in proactively controlling taboo interference during speech production?

ABSTRACTThis research investigated whether precues engage proactive control to reduce emotional interference during speech production. A picture-word interference task required participants to name target pictures accompanied by taboo, negative, or neutral distractors. Proactive control was manipulated by presenting precues that signalled the type of distractor that would appear on the next trial. Experiment 1 included one block of trials with precues and one without, whereas Experiment 2 mixed precued and uncued trials. Consistent with previous research, picture naming was slowed in both experiments when distractors were taboo or negative compared to neutral, with the greatest slowing effect when distractors were taboo. Evidence that precues engaged proactive control to reduce interference from taboo (but not negative) distractors was found in Experiment 1. In contrast, mixing precued trials in Experiment 2 resulted in no taboo cueing benefit. These results suggest that item-level proactive control can be engaged under certain conditions to reduce taboo interference during speech production, findings that help to refine a role for cognitive control of distraction during speech production.