The Decision to Engage Cognitive Control Is Driven by Expected Reward-Value: Neural and Behavioral Evidence

Abstract

Cognitive control is a fundamental skill reflecting the active use of task-rules to guide behavior and suppress inappropriate automatic responses. Prior work has traditionally used paradigms in which subjects are told when to engage cognitive control. Thus, surprisingly little is known about the factors that influence individuals' initial decision of whether or not to act in a reflective, rule-based manner. To examine this, we took three classic cognitive control tasks (Stroop, Wisconsin Card Sorting Task, Go/No-Go task) and created novel ‘free-choice’ versions in which human subjects were free to select an automatic, pre-potent action, or an action requiring rule-based cognitive control, and earned varying amounts of money based on their choices. Our findings demonstrated that subjects' decision to engage cognitive control was driven by an explicit representation of monetary rewards expected to be obtained from rule-use. Subjects rarely engaged cognitive control when the expected outcome was of equal or lesser value as compared to the value of the automatic response, but frequently engaged cognitive control when it was expected to yield a larger monetary outcome. Additionally, we exploited fMRI-adaptation to show that the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) represents associations between rules and expected reward outcomes. Together, these findings suggest that individuals are more likely to act in a reflective, rule-based manner when they expect that it will result in a desired outcome. Thus, choosing to exert cognitive control is not simply a matter of reason and willpower, but rather, conforms to standard mechanisms of value-based decision making. Finally, in contrast to current models of LPFC function, our results suggest that the LPFC plays a direct role in representing motivational incentives.

Heterogeneity Within the Frontoparietal Control Network and its Relationship to the Default and Dorsal Attention Networks

“…Specifically, FPCN B was significantly more associated with topics related to attention and action than FPCN A . Prior work suggests that FPCN B contributes to cognitive control by flexibly encoding task-relevant information including task rules (e.g., stimulusresponse mappings) and their relationship to expected reward outcomes [2][3][4]6,59,60 . Notably, FPCN B regions including the inferior frontal junction play a causal top-down role in modulating the DAN and perceptual attention 61,62 .…”

“…Parameters obtained from this step were subsequently applied to the functional (re-sampled to 3 mm 3 voxels) and structural (re-sampled to 1 mm 3 voxels) data during normalization to MNI space. The data were spatially-smoothed using an 8-mm 3 full-width at half-maximum Gaussian kernel to reduce the impact of inter-subject variability in brain anatomy.…”

“…Modern neuroscientific investigations have demonstrated that frontoparietal cortices contribute to executive control and adaptive behavior via the flexible encoding of task demands and desired outcomes, and the top-down modulation of processing in other brain regions [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] . Despite this progress, we lack a clear understanding of the functional organization of frontoparietal cortex, a critical step in discerning the network architecture underlying executive control.…”

How emotion context modulates unconscious goal activation during motor force exertion

“…This is because mathematically [(PA-UA)-(PC-UC)]=[(UC-UA)-(PC-PA)]. Similar analyses with exclusive masking procedures have been used in other incentive motivation studies (Dixon and Christoff, 2012;Elward et al, 2015;Pochon et al, 2002). Significant activations in the contrast to be masked that survived a threshold of p < .001 (uncorrected) were retained, with significant clusters containing a minimum of 50 voxels (p < .05; FWE corrected at the cluster level).…”

Aportes sobre el correlato neuroanatómico de la personalidad

“…Así formamos asociaciones entre reglas particulares y sus resultados esperados, en cuya evaluación se considera trascendental a la corteza prefrontal lateral 37 . En un estudio de RM funcional (fRM) se demostró que la LPFC derecha representaba la asociación entre una regla y un resultado motivacional esperado 42 . También se ha implicado a esta corteza en la búsqueda de recompensas futuras 43 .…”