Executive Functions

Flashcards covering key vocabulary and concepts from the Executive Functions lecture.

Executive Functions

Cognitive functions that enhance neural activity and suppress others, acting primarily on rules for behavior. They involve impairments in forming, updating, and implementing rules for appropriate behavior.

Prefrontal Cortex

Brain region that sets up rules for information flow in other brain regions, in order to meet immediate demands and achieve future goals.

Control Systems

Algorithms and devices that modulate interacting components in changing environments, regulating processes consciously or otherwise.

Lateral Prefrontal Cortex Damage

Results in the impaired ability to initiate motor movements, complex actions, and mental plans, leading to little spontaneity of thought or action, and potential withdrawal from society.

Abulia

A clinical condition characterized by lethargy, quiet withdrawal, slow movements, distractibility, and difficulty sustaining attention or motor actions, resulting from damage to lateral aspects of the frontal lobes.

Rule Encoding in Prefrontal Cortex

Neurons in the prefrontal cortex carry information about rules in a distributed manner, with the relative activity of neurons depending on the rules relevant to the current context.

Basal Ganglia Interaction with Prefrontal Cortex

Supports particular forms of cognitive control, especially for creating rules that map specific stimuli to specific responses.

Parietal Cortex and Rule Creation

Contributes to rule creation, particularly with aspects of executive function closely tied to the generation of actions, encoding the expected value of possible actions related to a potential decision.

Inhibition

The suppression of unimportant or distracting information or behavior, comprising halting behaviors, preventing irrelevant information, restraining inappropriate actions, and removing irrelevant information from working memory.

Oddball Task

A task where subjects attend to a continuous sequence of stimuli, responding differently to infrequent target stimuli, which evoke the P300 ERP component and fMRI activation in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

Go/No-Go Task

A task requiring subjects to respond to most stimuli ("go"), but to inhibit responding to particular infrequently presented stimuli ("no go"), evoking activation in the lateral prefrontal and parietal cortices.

Stop-Signal Task

A task where participants respond to stimuli but must inhibit responses if a signal to stop is presented, relying on circuits connecting lateral prefrontal cortex with the basal ganglia.

Ventral Prefrontal Cortex

Damage to this will often causes a generalized failure to match behavior to typical rules for social interactions, leading to argumentative, profane, or aggressive behavior.

Acquired Sociopathy

A severe form of frontal disinhibition syndrome, characterized by blunted emotional affect, poor decisions in social situations, and difficulty interacting with others due to ventromedial prefrontal damage.

Wisconsin Card Sorting Test

A task used for rule shifting, where subjects sort cards according to stimulus attributes and must shift sorting to a new rule after a predetermined number of correct sorts; prefrontal damage leads to perseveration.

Perseveration

The persistence of behavior despite receiving negative feedback, a hallmark of impaired prefrontal function.

Orbitofrontal Cortex

Facilitates shifting between rules for behavior in situations involving reward and punishment, incorporating affective information into plans for behavior.

Reversal Learning Tasks

Tasks where stimulus-reward contingencies are unexpectedly switched.

Frontopolar Cortex

Supports the higher-order integration of rules and is crucial for implementing higher-order goals, especially when balancing reward-seeking (exploitative) and information-seeking (exploratory) goals.

Raven's Progressive Matrices

A test to measure someone's ability to create complex mental models.

Temporal Abstraction

executive functions are organized according to their level of temporal abstraction

Policy Abstraction

Posterior regions support the formation and execution of simple rules linking stimuli to behavior. But they contend that the more anterior regions support higher-order policies for behavior, which are needed to determine which of several simple rules applies in the current context

Control Systems

Monitoring and conflict resolution.

Conflict Monitoring

Detecting and identifying events that require additional resources for their processing, depending on the anterior cingulate gyrus.

Stroop Task

A paradigm that generates response conflicts, with increased anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) activation on incongruent trials.

Error-Related Negativity (ERN)

A negative-polarity scalp electrical potential that follows mistaken actions, associated with the engagement of control processes.

Dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex

Related to control and monitoring, in regards to new information in relation to expectations.

Working Memory

Involves the temporary maintenance and manipulation of information that is not currently available to the senses but that is necessary for successfully achieving short-term behavioral objectives.

Alan Baddeley's Model of Working Memory

It model consists of three capacity-limited memory buffers and a control system: a phonological loop, a visuospatial sketchpad, and an episodic buffer.

Nelson Cowan's Model of Working Memory

It model is organized in two embedded levels. The first level of working memory consists of long-term memory representations in an "activated state". second level of working memory consists of activated representations that fall within the focus of executive control

Delay-Period Activity

The time between the initial activation of information in working memory and the use of that information to execute a particular action, associated with sustained activity in sensory regions.

Multivoxel Pattern Analysis (MVPA)

Technique that showed pattern of activation could be used to predict stimulus.