The Function and Organization of Lateral Prefrontal Cortex: A Test of Competing Hypotheses

The present experiment tested three hypotheses regarding the function and organization of lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC). The first account (the information cascade hypothesis) suggests that the anterior-posterior organization of lateral PFC is based on the timing with which cue stimuli reduce uncertainty in the action selection process. The second account (the levels-of-abstraction hypothesis) suggests that the anterior-posterior organization of lateral PFC is based on the degree of abstraction of the task goals. The current study began by investigating these two hypotheses, and identified several areas of lateral PFC that were predicted to be active by both the information cascade and levels-of-abstraction accounts. However, the pattern of activation across experimental conditions was inconsistent with both theoretical accounts. Specifically, an anterior area of mid-dorsolateral PFC exhibited sensitivity to experimental conditions that, according to both accounts, should have selectively engaged only posterior areas of PFC. We therefore investigated a third possible account (the adaptive context maintenance hypothesis) that postulates that both posterior and anterior regions of PFC are reliably engaged in task conditions requiring active maintenance of contextual information, with the temporal dynamics of activity in these regions flexibly tracking the duration of maintenance demands. Activity patterns in lateral PFC were consistent with this third hypothesis: regions across lateral PFC exhibited transient activation when contextual information had to be updated and maintained in a trial-by-trial manner, but sustained activation when contextual information had to be maintained over a series of trials. These findings prompt a reconceptualization of current views regarding the anterior-posterior organization of lateral PFC, but do support other findings regarding the active maintenance role of lateral PFC in sequential working memory paradigms

Aging, working memory capacity and the proactive control of recollection:An event-related potential study

The present study investigated the role of working memory capacity (WMC) in the control of recollection in young and older adults. We used electroencephalographic event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the effects of age and of individual differences in WMC on the ability to prioritize recollection according to current goals. Targets in a recognition exclusion task were words encoded using two alternative decisions. The left parietal ERP old/new effect was used as an electrophysiological index of recollection, and the selectivity of recollection measured in terms of the difference in its magnitude according to whether recognized items were targets or non-targets. Young adults with higher WMC showed greater recollection selectivity than those with lower WMC, while older adults showed nonselective recollection which did not vary with WMC. The data suggest that aging impairs the ability to engage cognitive control effectively to prioritize what will be recollected

Neural Mechanisms of Interference Control in Working Memory: Effects of Interference Expectancy and Fluid Intelligence

A critical aspect of executive control is the ability to limit the adverse effects of interference. Previous studies have shown activation of left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex after the onset of interference, suggesting that interference may be resolved in a reactive manner. However, we suggest that interference control may also operate in a proactive manner to prevent effects of interference. The current study investigated the temporal dynamics of interference control by varying two factors - interference expectancy and fluid intelligence (gF) - that could influence whether interference control operates proactively versus reactively.A modified version of the recent negatives task was utilized. Interference expectancy was manipulated across task blocks by changing the proportion of recent negative (interference) trials versus recent positive (facilitation) trials. Furthermore, we explored whether gF affected the tendency to utilize specific interference control mechanisms. When interference expectancy was low, activity in lateral prefrontal cortex replicated prior results showing a reactive control pattern (i.e., interference-sensitivity during probe period). In contrast, when interference expectancy was high, bilateral prefrontal cortex activation was more indicative of proactive control mechanisms (interference-related effects prior to the probe period). Additional results suggested that the proactive control pattern was more evident in high gF individuals, whereas the reactive control pattern was more evident in low gF individuals.The results suggest the presence of two neural mechanisms of interference control, with the differential expression of these mechanisms modulated by both experimental (e.g., expectancy effects) and individual difference (e.g., gF) factors

Neural Circuitry of Emotional and Cognitive Conflict Revealed through Facial Expressions

Neural systems underlying conflict processing have been well studied in the cognitive realm, but the extent to which these overlap with those underlying emotional conflict processing remains unclear. A novel adaptation of the AX Continuous Performance Task (AX-CPT), a stimulus-response incompatibility paradigm, was examined that permits close comparison of emotional and cognitive conflict conditions, through the use of affectively-valenced facial expressions as the response modality.Brain activity was monitored with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during performance of the emotional AX-CPT. Emotional conflict was manipulated on a trial-by-trial basis, by requiring contextually pre-cued facial expressions to emotional probe stimuli (IAPS images) that were either affectively compatible (low-conflict) or incompatible (high-conflict). The emotion condition was contrasted against a matched cognitive condition that was identical in all respects, except that probe stimuli were emotionally neutral. Components of the brain cognitive control network, including dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), showed conflict-related activation increases in both conditions, but with higher activity during emotion conditions. In contrast, emotion conflict effects were not found in regions associated with affective processing, such as rostral ACC.These activation patterns provide evidence for a domain-general neural system that is active for both emotional and cognitive conflict processing. In line with previous behavioural evidence, greatest activity in these brain regions occurred when both emotional and cognitive influences additively combined to produce increased interference

Connectivity-based parcellation of the thalamus explains specific cognitive and behavioural symptoms in patients with bilateral thalamic infarct

A novel approach based on diffusion tractography was used here to characterise the cortico-thalamic connectivity in two patients, both presenting with an isolated bilateral infarct in the thalamus, but exhibiting partially different cognitive and behavioural profiles. Both patients (G.P. and R.F.) had a pervasive deficit in episodic memory, but only one of them (R.F.) suffered also from a dysexecutive syndrome. Both patients had an MRI scan at 3T, including a T1-weighted volume. Their lesions were manually segmented. T1-volumes were normalised to standard space, and the same transformations were applied to the lesion masks. Nineteen healthy controls underwent a diffusion-tensor imaging (DTI) scan. Their DTI data were normalised to standard space and averaged. An atlas of Brodmann areas was used to parcellate the prefrontal cortex. Probabilistic tractography was used to assess the probability of connection between each voxel of the thalamus and a set of prefrontal areas. The resulting map of corticothalamic connections was superimposed onto the patients' lesion masks, to assess whether the location of the thalamic lesions in R.F. (but not in G. P.) implied connections with prefrontal areas involved in dysexecutive syndromes. In G.P., the lesion fell within areas of the thalamus poorly connected with prefrontal areas, showing only a modest probability of connection with the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Conversely, R.F.'s lesion fell within thalamic areas extensively connected with the ACC bilaterally, with the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and with the left supplementary motor area. Despite a similar, bilateral involvement of the thalamus, the use of connectivity-based segmentation clarified that R.F.'s lesions only were located within nuclei highly connected with the prefrontal cortical areas, thus explaining the patient's frontal syndrome. This study confirms that DTI tractography is a useful tool to examine in vivo the effect of focal lesions on interconnectivity brain patterns

Getting ready to use control:Advances in the measurement of young children's use of proactive control

A key developmental transition in executive function is in the temporal dynamics of its engagement: children shift from reactively calling to mind task-relevant information as needed, to being able to proactively maintain information across time in anticipation of upcoming demands. This transition is important for understanding individual differences and developmental changes in executive function; however, methods targeting its assessment are limited. We tested the possibility that Track-It, a paradigm developed to measure selective sustained attention, also indexes proactive control. In this task children must track a target shape as it moves unpredictably among moving distractors, and identify where it disappears, which may require proactively maintaining information about the target or goal. In two experiments (5-6 year-olds, Ns = 33, 64), children's performance on Track-It predicted proactive control across two established paradigms. These findings suggest Track-It measures proactive control in children. Theoretical possibilities regarding how proactive control and selective sustained attention may be related are also discussed

Under pressure: Response urgency modulates striatal and insula activity during decision-making under risk

When deciding whether to bet in situations that involve potential monetary loss or gain (mixed gambles), a subjective sense of pressure can influence the evaluation of the expected utility associated with each choice option. Here, we explored how gambling decisions, their psychophysiological and neural counterparts are modulated by an induced sense of urgency to respond. Urgency influenced decision times and evoked heart rate responses, interacting with the expected value of each gamble. Using functional MRI, we observed that this interaction was associated with changes in the activity of the striatum, a critical region for both reward and choice selection, and within the insula, a region implicated as the substrate of affective feelings arising from interoceptive signals which influence motivational behavior. Our findings bridge current psychophysiological and neurobiological models of value representation and action-programming, identifying the striatum and insular cortex as the key substrates of decision-making under risk and urgency

Motor Adaptation Scaled by the Difficulty of a Secondary Cognitive Task

Background: Motor learning requires evaluating performance in previous movements and modifying future movements. The executive system, generally involved in planning and decision-making, could monitor and modify behavior in response to changes in task difficulty or performance. Here we aim to identify the quantitative cognitive contribution to responsive and adaptive control to identify possible overlap between cognitive and motor processes. Methodology/Principal Findings: We developed a dual-task experiment that varied the trial-by-trial difficulty of a secondary cognitive task while participants performed a motor adaptation task. Subjects performed a difficulty-graded semantic categorization task while making reaching movements that were occasionally subjected to force perturbations. We find that motor adaptation was specifically impaired on the most difficult to categorize trials. Conclusions/Significance: We suggest that the degree of decision-level difficulty of a particular categorization differentially burdens the executive system and subsequently results in a proportional degradation of adaptation. Our results suggest

Reward elicits cognitive control over emotional distraction:Evidence from pupillometry

Attention is biased toward emotional stimuli, even when they are irrelevant to current goals. Motivation, elicited by performance-contingent reward, reduces behavioural emotional distraction. In emotionally-neutral contexts, reward is thought to encourage use of a proactive cognitive control strategy, altering anticipatory attentional settings to more effectively suppress distractors. The current preregistered study investigates whether a similar proactive shift occurs even when distractors are highly arousing emotional images. We monitored pupil area, an online measure of both cognitive and emotional processing, to examine how reward influences the timecourse of control. Participants (n = 110) identified a target letter flanking an irrelevant central image. Images were meaningless scrambles on 75% of trials; on the remaining 25%, they were intact positive (erotic), negative (mutilation), or neutral images. Half the participants received financial rewards for fast and accurate performance, while the other half received no performance-contingent reward. Emotional distraction was greater than neutral distraction, and both were attenuated by reward. Consistent with behavioural findings, pupil dilation was greater following emotional than neutral distractors, and dilation to intact distractors (regardless of valence) was decreased by reward. Although reward did not enhance tonic pupil dilation (an index of sustained proactive control), exploratory analyses showed that reward altered the timecourse of control – eliciting a sharp, rapid, increase in dilation immediately preceding stimulus-onset (reflecting dynamic use of anticipatory control), that extended until well after stimulus-offset. These findings suggest that reward alters the timecourse of control by encouraging proactive preparation to rapidly disengage from emotional distractors