This book offers an overview of state-of-the-art research in cognitive control and task switching, which involve the regulation of one's own behavior by reference to internal plans, schedules, and rules. An international cast of researchers from a range of disciplines reviews the latest findings and theories regarding this fundamental yet mysterious aspect of the human brain and behavior.

From our ability to attend to many stimuli occurring in rapid succession to the transformation of memories during a night of sleep, cognition occurs over widely varying time scales spanning milliseconds to days and beyond. Cognitive processing is often influenced by several behavioral variables as well as nonlinear interactions between multiple neural systems. This frequently produces unpredictable patterns of behavior and makes understanding the underlying temporal factors influencing cognition a fruitful area of hypothesis development and scientific inquiry. Across two reviews, a perspective, and twelve original research articles covering the domains of learning, memory, attention, cognitive control, and social decision making this research topic sheds new light on the temporal dynamics of cognitive processing.

Covering basic theory, new research, and intersections with adjacent fields, this is the first comprehensive reference work on cognitive control – our ability to use internal goals to guide thought and behavior. Draws together expert perspectives from a range of disciplines, including cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and neurology Covers behavioral phenomena of cognitive control, neuroanatomical and computational models of frontal lobe function, and the interface between cognitive control and other mental processes Explores the ways in which cognitive control research can inform and enhance our understanding of brain development and neurological and psychiatric conditions

The thirty-two contributions discuss evidence from psychological experiments with healthy and brain-damaged subjects, functional imaging, electrophysiology, and computational modeling.

Individuals do not always perform to their full capability on cognitive tasks. When this occurs, the usual explanation is that the individual was not properly motivated. But this begs the important question: How and why does motivation interact with and influence cognitive processing and the control processes that regulate it? What are the underlying mechanisms that govern such interactions? Motivation has been an important component of psychology and neuroscience throughout the history of the field, but has recently been rejuvenated by rapidly accelerating research interest in the nature of motivation-cognition interactions, particularly as they impact control processes and goal-directed behavior. This volume provides an up-to-date snapshot of the state of research in this exciting, expanding area. The contributors to the volume are internationally-renowned researchers that lead the field in conducting groundbreaking studies. Moreover, they represent a variety of research perspectives and traditions: cognitive psychology and neuroscience, animal learning, social, affective, and personality psychology, and development, lifespan, and aging studies. This book summarizes our current state of understanding of the relationship between motivation and cognitive control, and serves as an essential reference for both students and researchers.

The topic of this thesis is cognitive control: how the brain organises itself to perform the many tasks it is capable of and how it switches flexibly among them. Task-switching experiments reveal a substantial cost in reaction time and accuracy after a switch in tasks. This "switch cost" is reduced by preparation (suggesting anticipatory task-set reconfiguration), but not eliminated. The thesis focuses on the sources of the "residual" cost. Most accounts attribute it to response selection being prolonged on a task-switch trial by task conflict, e.g. by 'task-set inertia'? persisting activation/inhibition of the previous task's S-R rules? or their associative reactivation by the stimulus. Four experiments used event-related potentials (ERPs) to determine which stages of task processing are influenced by a change in tasks, looking for delays in process-specific markers in the ERP. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that a prepared switch to a reading task from a perceptual judgement delayed early ERP markers of lexical access by a large fraction of the RT switch cost, suggesting that a substantial part of the residual cost arises in processes earlier than response selection, possibly due to task-related attentional inertia. Markers of lexical access observed in the non-lexical task were larger on switch than repeat trials, providing the first electrophysiological evidence of task-set inertia. Experiment 3 examined the effects of an unprepared switch in the same way. ERP waveforms were modulated by a switch before markers of lexical access were evident, suggesting additional processing demands compete for resources with lexical access. A simple delay, however, was not found; post-stimulus task-set reconfiguration does not just insert an extra processing stage. Experiment 4 looked for a delay in the onset of an early ERP marker of emotional processing when the task switched between categorising facial expression and classifying a superimposed letter. No such delay was found in this case, and ERP markers of emotion processing were present to the same extent in the letter task. This suggests that, given appropriate spatial attention, processing facial emotion unfolds automatically, independent of attention allocation to the facial features. Experiments 5-7 further explored the link between conflict due to processing the irrelevant stimulus dimension and the ERP post-stimulus negativity that accompanies the residual cost. The negativity could be elicited even on trials of non-switching blocks by prior training on classifying the irrelevant attribute of the stimulus using the same responses. But this effect did not seem to result from the trained class of irrelevant attribute attracting more attention. Finally, Experiment 8 followed up an incidental observation in Experiment 1 to establish the novel observation that a task-switching context abolishes the usual ERP correlate of withholding a response in a go/no-go paradigm, suggesting an interesting interaction between task-set control and response inhibition.

During the past decade, evidence of dissociation between conscious and nonconscious information processing has emerged from the study of normal subjects and brain damaged patients. The thirty-five original contributions in this book cover the latest work on this important topic. During the past decade, evidence of dissociation between conscious and nonconscious information processing has emerged from the study of normal subjects and brain damaged patients. The thirty-five original contributions in this book cover the latest work on this important topic across such traditional areas of research as vision, face recognition, spatial attention, control processes, semantic memory, episodic memory, and learning. Each section is introduced by an overview chapter that presents and evaluates the available empirical evidence in a given area and is followed by several experimental papers. The book opens with the Association Lecture, by George Mandler, "On Remembering without Really Trying: Hypermnesia, Incubation, and Mind Popping."

This book presents social, cognitive and neuroscientific approaches to the study of self-control, connecting recent work in cognitive and social psychology with recent advances in cognitive and social neuroscience. In bringing together multiple perspectives on self-control dilemmas from internationally renowned researchers in various allied disciplines, this is the first single-reference volume to illustrate the richness, depth, and breadth of the research in the new field of self control.