COGNITIVE Cognitive control Flashcards
(19 cards)
What is inhibition?
Delay rewards and plan (buy food now, rush home, then eat).
What is flexibility?
Can perform large range of behaviours and tasks. Select them flexibly- suit different contexts. Experiment participants; filling out questionnaires, responding to sensory stimuli, following and adapting to task rules.
What is multi-tasking?
Some tasks done in parallel if don’t ‘collide’ or compete. I.e. listening to instrumental music while reading a book.
What is cognition?
Basis of ‘intelligent’ behaviour. Overrides habitual resonses for long-term goals. Orchestrates sensory, memory and motor systems-> cognitive controls.
What is the key cognitive neural structures in mammals?
Prefrontal cortex.
What is executive functions?
Used interchangeably with cognitive control. Executive function used for specific components, cognitive control less clear separation of distinct subcomponents.
What is the Working Memory model (Baddeley + Hitch ,1974)?
Central Executive, Visuospatial Sketchpad, Episodic Buffer, Phonological Loop, Long-term memory.
What is inhibitory control?
Key executive function. Stops us being impulsive. Change and choose how to behave and react. Key for pro-social behaviour.
Inhibitory control of attention- cocktail party effect, top/down vs bottom up, exogenous vs endogenous processing.
What is a go/ nogo task?
Ppt need to respond to some stimuli (go stimuli) but not to others (no-go stimuli). E.g. traffic light.
Other measures of behavioural inhibition: stroop task, go. nogo task ,stop- signal task.
What is cognitive Inhibition?
Ability to inhibit unwanted or unproductive thoughts. But hard to measure, assess behavioural inhibition- generalise to cognitive inhibition.
What is involved in successful inhibition?
Impulsive responses quicker to reach action threshold than correct responses.
Successful inhibition suppresses the prepotent response allowing correct response to reach threshold.
What areas of brain inhibit automatic and habitual behaviour?
Frontal lobe, and also basal ganglia.
What is the difference between directed and competitive inhibition?
Directed= don’t do this thing.
Competitive= when many actions compete and the inhibiting one wins.
Detail cognitive flexibility?
Builds on inhibition and working memory. Can change perspective visually, spatially and interpersonally. Relies on inhibition of old information and loading new info into WM.
Can create change in priorities and allows adaption to new opportunities and admittion of defeat.
Detail Wisconsin Card sorting test?
Draw card, assign category 1-4 to match either colour, number and symbol.
Get feedback on if it is right or wrong. If feedback ‘correct should keep assigning the next card to the same category. If wrong try matching to another category. Correct category will change without warning so much change category to match to.
Used for examining cognitive impairments in neurological damage or psych disorder patients.
What are some challenges of Wisconsin’s card sorting test for patients?
Neurological damage in human patients unique in each patient.
Studies attempt to identify more localized involvement of e.g. prefrontal subregions.
Solving the task doesn’t involve cognitive flexibility but also other aspects of executive function.
How are executive functions related?
Working memory links to inhibitory control through goal maintenance and inhibiting environmental and internal distractions.
Both are involved with cognitive flexibility.
All three link to higher-level executive functions.
What are the 4 supporting mechanisms also exposed to inhibition and attentional mechanisms?
-Performance monitoring: detect errors or drops in performance. Attending to something going wrong. Perseveration Errors!
-Updating: updating understanding of the rules. Failing to do so inflexibility.
-Conflict: selection of new plan in line with updated rules. 2 possible rules.
-Shifting: shifting to new plan and enacting based on previous steps. Compulsivity- unable to shift to change behaviour.
