Wednesday 15 October 2008 | 16:00 - 17:00
Location: Oost-Indisch Huis, VOC zaal, Kloveniersburgwal 48, Amsterdam
prof. dr. Gordon Logan
Centennial Professor of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville USA
The Mysterious Story of Cognitive Control
In most instances, our thoughts and actions are directed toward the fulfilment of our goals. We can’t always get what we want, but if we try, sometimes we get what we need. The processes that underlie these abilities have been the subject of intense study for the last 20 years. An important line of research has focused on the question of how we inhibit thoughts and actions that are irrelevant or inappropriate to the fulfilment of our goals. This ability is captured in a simple experimental procedure called the stop-signal task, in which people are asked to make choice responses to a series of discrete stimuli and occasionally are asked to inhibit their response to one of the stimuli. The stop-signal paradigm has been studied in a broad range of disciplines, including cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, lifespan development, psychopathology, and individual differences. I will describe recent developments in the stop-signal paradigm, focusing on two topics. First, I will discuss a computational model that explains both behavioural and neural data, extending the independent race model I developed with Cowan and grounding it in neural computations. Second, I will describe experiments that challenge the idea that stop-signal performance reflects top-down cognitive control by showing evidence of bottom-up control through associative learning. Some of our control comes from within us, through our goals and desires, but some comes from the world outside, which activates our knowledge and tells us what we should do.