Cognitive Control and Consciousness: Summary Notes

Cognitive Control: Automatic and Controlled Attentional Processes

• Cognitive control involves mechanisms of attention, working memory, and consciousness.
• Bottom-up attention: Stimulus-driven.
• Top-down attention: Voluntary.
• Automaticity: Processing due to practice or salience (e.g., Stroop task).
  • Incongruency slows color naming due to conflict between word and color processing.
• Visual Spatial Cueing Paradigm: Explores voluntary vs. stimulus-driven attention.
• Brain activity measures (fMRI, EEG) are informative for assessing mechanisms driving behavior.

Brain Mechanisms of Attention

• Brain regions responsible for top-down and bottom-up attention are of interest.
• EEG indicators of spatial orienting and visual processing show components like P1, N1, LPD, and LDAP.

Working Memory

• Short-term memory: Retains information briefly through encoding, storage, and retrieval.
• Working memory (Baddeley's model): Holds information online and manipulates it.
  • Components: Central Executive, Phonological store (with articulatory control & phonological loop), Visuospatial sketchpad.
• Assessment: Corsi block test for visuospatial memory.

Consciousness

• Definition: Awareness of perceptions, thoughts, feelings, external world, and self-awareness.
• Hard Problem (Chalmers, 1995): How do physical processes produce subjective experience?
• Function: Possibly a social function, aiding in understanding others.
• I spy study: Suggests will is a fabricated experience from perceived causal link between thought and action.

Conscious Will

• Conscious will arises when a thought precedes an action, is consistent with it, and lacks alternative causes (Wegner, 2003).
• Libet's experiments: Preparatory motor activity precedes conscious decision to move.
  • Critiques focus on timing and measurement precision.
• Brain activity patterns can predict decisions up to seven seconds before conscious awareness (Soon et al.).

Neuroscience of Consciousness

• Consciousness may follow pre-conscious decisions.
• Consciousness relies on integrated brain processes, not a single region. Integration is key.