Cognitive control is the ability to make flexible decisions given the diverse information in our environments. More specifically, the brain uses task demands, rules, and contexts and selects appropriate actions to achieve its goals. Many psychiatric disorders exhibit dysfunctional control, from underactive (e.g. schizophrenia) to overactive (e.g. obsessive-compulsive disorder) cognitive control. The mind’s skill of parsing through different inputs and narrowing down what is essential for effective behavior uses a ‘control representation’. However, the neural instantiation of control representations is still poorly understood. Our overall goal is to understand whether control representations are fixed or change with task demands. In this subproject, we test whether the geometry (format) of representations influences or can be influenced by behavior. We designed two tasks that differ only in their rule structures’ complexity, and hypothesize that the more complex task is more demanding on the cognitive control system. For both tasks, participants must correctly categorize a group of images and sounds (stimuli). In the simpler task, there is a hierarchy of importance for the information (some of the stimuli may be ignored depending on the trial), but in the more complex task, all information is necessary for a correct answer. We predict that we will measure differences in behavior (i.e. participant performance) between the tasks as a function of the stimuli switching categories. Different trial types of trial switches will cause performance deficits seen in slower reaction times and more errors across the tasks. Additionally, we predict this performance difference will correlate with a difference in brain activity (measured through fMRI data collection) in regions known to underlie cognitive control. In this poster, we report behavioral similarities and differences among subjects collected on both tasks (N = 31) and examine the significance of these findings in relation to the overall study’s goals. By studying how people structure control representations based on rules in their environment, we can better understand how the human brain can be adaptive and flexible.
Aquino, Camille,
"Investigating the Effect of Cognitive Control Demands on Strategies and Task Performance"
(2022).
Summer Research Symposium.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/7gt6-rj60
Each year, Brown University showcases the research of its undergraduates at the Summer Research Symposium. More than half of the student-researchers are UTRA recipients, while others receive funding from a variety of Brown-administered and national programs and fellowships and go …
