Cognitive control and the prefrontal cortex

’Cognitive control’ refers to processes that allow us to flexibly adapt our behavior according to our internal goals and external environmental demands. Such processes afford us the capacity to control our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Cognitive control is believed to be mediated through the interaction of the prefrontal cortex (the control centre of the brain) with sensory and motor areas in order to establish the proper mappings between input from the outside world, our internal state and ultimately our behaviour. Although the activity of the prefrontal cortex has been a focus of many studies in recent years the interaction of this control center with other brain areas (i.e. functional connectivity) has received only limited attention. EEG measures voltage-fluctuations of neurons over time, which is an index for local brain activation. In the proposed series of studies, we will examine brain activity (measured using EEG) during different critical dimensions of cognitive control including: response inhibition, environmental change detection and attention.

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