Lecture 11- Cognitive Control 2 Flashcards
What is abstract thought?
Using concepts to make and understand
generalizations. Thought where concepts are not tied directly to
specific experiences
What are some examples of abstract thought?
- Humor
- Imagination
- Social rules
What tests measure for abstract rules?
- WCST
- DNMS (delay non response to sampling)
What are abstract rules?
Abstract rules describe interactive and causal associations between objects, events and responses. Thus, abstract rules can evoke
completely different responses to the same stimulus exemplar depending on the goal and context. e.g. WCST second block
What are concrete rules?
Describe simple spatio-temporal links between objects: A red light means stop (stimulusresponse or stimulus - outcome) e.g. WCST first block
What is Raven’s Progressive Matrices? What does it test?
- It’s the test where there is the three rows of three with different shapes and orientations of a rectangle placed overtop
- The task is to fill in the correct shape to complete the pattern in the bottom right
- It is a test of non-verbal reasoning requiring abstract thought
How were rule responsive neurons in monkey’s dorsolateral prefrontal cortex discovered?
-Match to sampling task or non-match to sampling task
-Blocks alternating
-This requires abstract thought as need to monitor what rule is appropriate at the present time
-Rule responsive neurons were discovered as neural activity was
dependent on the rule (match or non-match) irrespective of the object or the cue used to instruct the rule
What proverb was used to indicate PFC function in Murphy et al, 2013? What were the findings?
- Proverbs are a good indicator of the ability to generate abstract thought and by extensive PFC function as to understand them you can’t just take the literal meaning of words + you have to widen the concept to apply to a variety of situations.
- Murphy et al. used “Rome wasn’t built in a day” and got participants choose what they thought the meaning was from a set list.
- Responses were allocated a score based on their merit.
For example:
- It takes patience and time to complete a great and worthwhile project 2
- Things take time, but you will get there in the end 1
- Any great city or empire. Like Rome will not be completed overnight * 0
- Rome is a beautiful city* 0
- Quit while you are ahead 0
*= concrete responses (not using abstract thought)
Results:
- The percentage of concrete errors made in regards to proverb interpretation depends on what part of pre-frontal cortex was damaged
- Those that had damage to the left lateral PFC had the most, then medial, then right lateral and healthy control
What is an experiment that manipulates abstraction?
- Badre and D’Esposito (2007)
- Basically had to respond with fingers to choose a block/ tile. The criteria by which you had to respond according to got more complex with each round requiring greater abstraction
- The results showed that the more abstract/ complicated the task the further forward activation was in the frontal lobe(shown via fMRI scan)
What is the proposed organisation of the PFC (where does information come from and what happens once it reaches the PFC)?
- The ventral (‘what’) stream comes from the temporal lobe
- The stimulus/ visual information comes from the occipital lobe
- The dorsal (‘how’) stream comes from the parietal lobe
All this information converges in the prefrontal cortex where there is division according to level of abstraction required. More concrete information is processed at the back while the more forward prefrontal cortex is in charge of more abstract thought.
How is the PFC invovled in planning?
- Plan strategy to get to a goal
- Goal planning often requires the development of an action hierarchy (prioritizing what tasks are more important in order to complete the goal)
- Damage to prefrontal cortex makes this hard
What does cognitive control during goal planning and execution involve?
- Identifying primary goal and sub-goals
- Retrieval and selection of relevant information
- Simultaneously maintaining multiple subgoals
- Determine what is required to achieve goals
- Anticipating consequences (falling back to a plan B if required)
What test is used to see the effect of Prefrontal lesions on the ability to organise behaviour? Why was it necessary to develop this test? What did the results show?
- Multiple errands test (Shallice and Burgess, 1991): given a hold bunch of tasks to do around a shopping center. Required multitasking + planning ahead to make optimum journey and get back in a certain time.
- Needed to be developed because normal IQ scores (verbal, performance) were coming back normal despite their being real consequences for prefrontal lesion patients.
- Results showed that while healthy controls took the most logical path through the mall and limited back tracking, those with frontal damage did not. They often backtracked a lot and even went into areas completely unnecessary.
In the Multiple errands test which group of participants had the most issues?
Those with Ventromedial pre-frontal damage had most issues as opposed to those with pre-frontal damage, non PFC patients (some other brain injury to control for being in hospital), and normal.
What is a proposed downside to cognitive control via the PFC?
-The role of dorsolateral PFC is to define a set of responses suitable for a particular task and then biasing these for selection - ‘sculpting the response space’ (Frith)
-Therefore, it could limited creativity
-Perhaps removal of PFC may free up the response space and so
enhance ‘creativity’.
