executive functions (week 6) Flashcards

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1
Q

what are executive functions?

A

executive functions coordinate other brain modules to enable flexible, purposeful, goal-directed behaviour - they are needed to optimise performance in situations that require coordination between several cognitive processes

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2
Q

what are the three surfaces of the prefrontal cortex and what processes are they implicated with?

A

lateral - implicated in “cold” control processes (cognitive aspects)
medial and orbital - implicated in “hot” control (emotional/social regulation of behaviour)

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3
Q

what are the five general situations that require executive functions (Norman & Shalice, 1986)?

A
  1. situations involving planning or decision making
  2. situations involving error correction or troubleshooting
  3. situations where responses are not well-learned or contain novel sequences of actions
  4. situations judged to be dangerous or technically difficult
  5. situations that require the overcoming of a strong habitual response or resisting temptation
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4
Q

what problems does damage to the prefrontal cortex cause in regards to the wisconsin card sorting test?

A

patients with prefrontal cortex damage fail to update the rule changes and exhibit preservation behaviour i.e., they keep responding using a previously correct response

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5
Q

what did Monchi et al, (2001) find out about the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC)?

A

it is related to rule changes and is most strongly activated for negative feedback, suggesting this region is involved when there is a need to change the rule

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6
Q

what is the role of the anterior cingulate (ACC) in executive functions?

A
  1. detection of errors and detection of response conflict
  2. stroop test: functional imaging and lesion studies suggest involvement of anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)
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7
Q

what is pretrides’ (2000) theory of working memory?

A
  1. assumed division of prefrontal cortex into at least to separate processes - maintenance (retention) and manipulation (updating)
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8
Q

what is the evidence for functional specialisation within PFC?

A
  1. firth (2000): left DLPFC may be responsible for selecting a range of plausible responses - “sculpting the response space”/task-setting
  2. firth et al. (1991): left DLPFC active in “free will” - choosing which fingers to move or which word to say vs. being told what to do
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9
Q

functional specialisation within the prefrontal cortex: right dorsolateral PFC

A

may be important in monitoring and sustained attention, both for externally presented information (perception tasks) and internally generated information (memory tasks) - activity greatests in conditions of uncertainty

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10
Q

what doe unitary accounts argue about executive functions?

A

unitary accounts argue that there are no ‘executive functions’, just one general underlying function
- in support of this, patients’ performance on many tests of executive function are correlated with each other, and with fluid intelligence (Roca et al., 2010)

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11
Q

what is the multiple-demand network (unitary accounts)?

A

evidence for a single set of fronto-parietal brain regions called the multiple demand network that is active during all tasks that we consider to involve executive functions (Duncan and Owen, 2000)

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