Cognition Chapter 5

Cognitive control

“The ability to orchestrate thought and action in accordance with internal goals”; also known as executive control

Ex: Planning, deciding, selecting behaviors, and coordinating more than one action (a conductor leading musicians)

Proactive control

Cognitive control applied in anticipation of a challenge

Ex: “I know there will be candy at the checkout counter, so I have to be strong.”

Reactive control

Cognitive control applied only in reaction to a challenge

Ex: “Ack! Candy! Must. Resist.”

Resource

The limitations in how much information the mind can process at any given time

Ex: Attending to only a handful of external objects

Internal attention

The limitations in how much information can be prioritized within the mind

Ex: Plotting an alphabetical route through San Francisco, Beijing London, Paris, Nairobi, and Sydney

Cognitive load

A task’s difficulty

Ex: Walking is low load; texting while walking is high load

Cognitive overlap

How much simultaneous tasks compete for the same mental resources

Ex: Texting + driving (both need looking) vs. music + driving (auditory vs. visual/motor)

Dual-task experiments

Experiments requiring participants to do two tasks at the same time

Ex: Driving in a simulator while remembering words and answering math questions

Cognitive interference

Occurs when load is high or two tasks overlap, and performance suffers

Ex: Slower braking and more crashes during cell phone conversations

Automatic process

A task requiring minimal cognitive effort

Ex: Listening to the radio

Controlled process

A task requiring more cognitive involvement

Ex: Talking on a cell phone

Perseveration errors

Persistent responses that fail to adapt to changing rules or circumstances

Ex: Prefrontal patients keep pressing the previously rewarded button in a delayed-alternation task

Delayed-alternation tasks

Tasks in which a reward predictably alternates between two options

Ex: Press A, then B, then A… Typical people catch on; prefrontal patients don’t

Inhibition

The ability to suppress information, thoughts, or actions that may interfere with ongoing behavior

Ex: A police officer deciding whether to inhibit the impulse to use force

Stop-signal task

Respond quickly to a green circle but withhold the response when a red stop signal appears

Ex: Late stop signals are harder to obey; good inhibitors do better on late signals

Sustained attention (vigilance)

The ability to maintain focus on a task

Ex: Truck drivers and air traffic controllers; the continuous performance task

Stroop interference

It takes longer to name colors when the word meanings conflict with the ink color

Ex: Naming the ink of the word RED printed in green

Simon task

Also called the spatial interference task: spatial incompatibility between target location and responding hand slows response time

Ex: Blue → same-side key, green → opposite-side key; incompatible trials are slower (the Simon effect)

Flanker task

Reveals both perceptual and response interference

Ex: The center arrowhead with flankers; LAMP DESK LAMP vs. GOLD DESK GOLD

Perceptual interference

Interference from distractors that make the target harder to see

Ex: Closely spaced flankers XX←XX

Response interference

A slowing caused by distractors that elicit a conflicting response

Ex: Flankers pointing the opposite direction of the from the target → → ← → →

Conflict monitoring

Detecting interference; operates like an alarm system

Ex: Noticing word-meaning conflict in Stroop or a stop signal

Conflict resolution

Reducing detected interference with inhibition or other behavioral adjustments

Ex: Adjusting your next free throw after a miss

Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)

The central conflict monitor; also registers errors, more active in prediction errors

Ex: more active in Stroop, stop-signal, flanker, and Simon conflicts

Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

A brain area important for cognitive control that inhibits distracting interference

Ex: More activity → smaller Stroop interference

Error detection

The ACC registers and responds to errors, triggering adjustments that reduce further error

Ex: An “internal coach”: slowing down before the next curve after a video game crash

Prediction error

Occurs whenever you don’t receive the reward or outcome you predicted

Ex: Losing or tying in rock-paper-scissors; an 80%-reward option failing 20% of the time

Error-related negativity (ERN)

An EEG response to error: a large negative signal in the waveform

Ex: Lower ERN predicts cocaine relapse; higher ERN in OCD

Mental chronometry

Studies the timing of perceptual and cognitive processing from response-time measurements

Ex: Measuring R1 and R2 to two successive visual signals

Psychological refractory period

The delay in responding to a second stimulus presented very soon after the first; a fundamental limit on information processing

Ex: R2 slows as the S1-S2 interval shrinks; the slope often reaches -1

Central bottleneck model

Only one response can be selected at a time, so the second response is queued

Ex: One open fast-food counter

Resource sharing

Both responses can be selected at once, but priority is strategically given to the first

Ex: Multiple cashiers, but the manager opened only one line

task-switch cost

The speed and accuracy penalty of switching tasks

Ex: Digit row with 15 switches vs. 1 switch; checking texts while writing a paper

Preparation effect

More time between targets gives more preparation time and reduces the task-switch cost

Ex: Letter/digit task with longer intervals between targets

Residual switch cost

A significant switch cost persists even with long delays and ample preparation; practice reduces it but doesn’t eliminate it

Ex: Always less efficient than focused work, even for experienced multi-taskers

Working memory

“A brain system that provides temporary storage and manipulation of the information necessary for such complex cognitive tasks as language comprehension, learning and reasoning”

Ex: A desktop for your mind; it correlated with reading comprehension, intelligence, and F-15 pilots’ situational awareness

Storage

Maintaining information after it is no longer available in perception; a form of internal attention

Ex: Summarizing a professor’s study after looking away

Manipulates

Performs operations on and transforms information

Ex: Subtracting 37 from 52 in your head; alphabetizing L F X P V B G

Long-term memory

The more permanent memory system with much greater capacity and durability than working memory

Ex: Remembering a new friend’s name the next day

Central executive

The primary system for controlling attention and thinking, where information is manipulated

Ex: The CPU chip; prefrontal cortex; separable components: mental set shifting, information updating, inhibition

Phonological loop

Stores and rehearses verbal and acoustic information

Ex: Repeating B-A-D-D-E-L-E-Y in your head as you type it

Phonological store

Holds sound- or speech-based information for 1 to 2 seconds

Ex: Limited by the number of syllables it can maintain

Articulatory rehearsal loop

Inner speech that maintains phonological information in real time, with limited capacity

Ex: Rehearsing “Donde esta el bano?”; activated Broca’s area (speech brain area/brain speaking to itself)

Visuospatial sketchpad

Stores and manipulates visual information; also called visual short-term memory

Ex: Holding colors; switching together successive eye fixations

Visual short-term memory

Retaining visual information over time when the perceptual image is gone or has changed

Ex: Changes-detection tasks: capacity of about four objects

Episodic buffer

A multimodal storage space that integrates information from the phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, and long-term memory

Ex: Freshly mixing salad dressing; its contents are accessible to conscious awareness

Digit-span task

Repeat back lists of numbers that get progressively longer until you start to make errors

Ex: “7, 4, 9” → “2, 5, 3, 9, 1, 7, 8, 1, 0”

Seven plus or minus two

The average capacity of the articulatory rehearsal loop

Ex: Average digit-span performance of about seven items

Chunks

Flexible units of capacity: whatever unit is meaningful to the participant

Ex: 149162536496481 → squares of 1-9; chess masters’ chunking of real positions

Word-length effect

Working memory capacity for words depends on spoken duration or syllable length

Ex: You can remember about as many items as you can say in 2 seconds; Arabic digits are longer, so Arabic speakers have smaller digit spans

Acoustic similarity effect

Reduced working memory capacity for items similar in sound

Ex: “man, cap, can, map, mad” is harder than “pit, day, cow, pen, rig.”

Irrelevant speech effect

Impairment of working memory by irrelevant spoken material

Ex: Even nonsense words like “blicket” disrupt it, but noise bursts do not

Articulatory suppression

Disruption of working memory from uttering irrelevant sounds

Ex: Repeating “da da da…” blocks rehearsal and removes the word-length and acoustic similarity effects (verbal information only)

Serial recall

A form of phonological working memory that involves remembering a series of numbers

Ex: Disrupted by music listening

Slot model

Each slot is an object; all of its features are stores without reducing capacity for other objects, up to about four

Ex: A waiting room with four chairs; the inferior IPS follows this pattern

Resource model

Capacity is a limited resource shared among objects, depending on their complexity

Ex: A bench seating more children or fewer adults; the superior IPS follows this pattern

Individuate

To distinguish objects; position lets you track identical objects as separate entities

Ex: Tracking an array of identical dots by their locations

Emotional regulation

The ability to manage one’s emotions, such as our response to stress; a cognitive control function

Ex: Inhibiting maladaptive negative thoughts

Rumination

An incessant focus on one’s negative thoughts

Ex: Common in major depression (more common in women, starting in adolescence)

Yerkes-Dodson curve

Describes how performance suffers from anxiety, especially for difficult tasks; performance is lowest at too-low and too-high arousal

Ex: Choking: only high-working-memory-capacity people suffered under pressure

Ego depletion

Exhaustion of one’s energy for mental activity, impairing cognitive control and other cognitive activities

Ex: Israeli parole judges’ favorable rulings fall from ~65% to near zero before a food break (replication caution)

Scarcity hypothesis

Scarcity impairs cognitive control

Ex: Sugar cane farmers did worse before harvest; low-income shoppers did worse after a $1500 car-repair question but not a $150 one

Attention restoration theory

being out in nature can restore cognitive fatigue

Ex: A forest-park walk beat a city walk on attention and working memory tasks

Supertaskers

The roughly 3% of participants whose performance doesn’t deteriorate (and may even improve) when performing more tasks

Ex: Waston & Strayer (2010); about 97% fail the dual-task driving test