Conflict and cognitive control

ABSTRACT—Recent research from cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience has suggested that the control mechanisms by which people are able to regulate task performance can be dissociated into evaluative and ex-ecutive components. One process, implemented in the an-terior cingulate cortex of the brain,monitors the amount of conflict that occurs during information processing; an-other process, implemented in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, is involved with maintaining the requirements of the task at hand and with biasing information processing in favor of appropriate responses. In the current article, we review this theory and some of the research that has supported it, including its implication for understanding cognitive disturbances in clinical disorders such as schizo-phrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder. We conclude by addressing several interesting possibilities for future research. KEYWORDS—attention; interference control; prefrontal cortex; anterior cingulate cortex; cognition Whenever one performs a task, one has to make sure that one selects the relevant information (stimuli, actions) and not get distracted by stimuli or thoughts that are irrelevant to the task. Such distraction might lead to inappropriate actions, such as errors. How the brain manages to do this is the central question in this paper: specifically, how people manage to pay more attention after they have either made an error or almost made an error. One of the key aspects of cognitive control is how flexible it is. The issue of how people monitor and correct for errors has be-come a popular topic of inquiry in cognitive research; not only can this issue offer insight into the flexible nature of control and self-monitoring, but understanding the cognitive and neural basis of these functions can possibly shed substantial light on cognitive dysfunction of self-monitoring and control in clinical disorders such as schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)