This paper presents an attempt to bridge the gap between logical and cognitive treatments of strategic reasoning in games. There have been extensive formal debates about the merits of the principle of backward induction among game theorists and logicians. Experimental economists and psychologists have shown that human subjects, perhaps due to their bounded resources, do not always follow the backward induction strategy, leading to unexpected outcomes. Recently, based on an eye-tracking study, it has turned out that even human subjects who (...) produce the outwardly correct ‘backward induction answer’ use a different internal reasoning strategy to achieve it. The paper presents a formal language to represent different strategies on a finer-grained level than was possible before. The language and its semantics help to precisely distinguish different cognitive reasoning strategies, that can then be tested on the basis of computational cognitive models and experiments with human subjects. The syntactic framework of the formal system provides a generic way of constructing computational cognitive models of the participants of the Marble Drop game. (shrink)

In this commentary, I will argue that the componential and emergent views of cognitive control as defined by Cooper (2010) do not necessarily oppose each other, and I will try to make a case for their interdependence. First, I will use the construct of cognitive inhibition—one of the main componential control functions mentioned in the target articles—to illustrate my line of reasoning. Then, I will comment on how some of the target articles, each from a different perspective, bring arguments in (...) favor of this integrative view. (shrink)

The ability to reason and problem‐solve in novel situations, as measured by the Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM), is highly predictive of both cognitive task performance and real‐world outcomes. Here we provide evidence that RAPM performance depends on the ability to reallocate attention in response to self‐generated feedback about progress. We propose that such an ability is underpinned by the basal ganglia nuclei, which are critically tied to both reward processing and cognitive control. This hypothesis was implemented in a neurocomputational (...) model of the RAPM task, which was used to derive novel predictions at the behavioral and neural levels. These predictions were then verified in one neuroimaging and two behavioral experiments. Furthermore, an effective connectivity analysis of the neuroimaging data confirmed a role for the basal ganglia in modulating attention. Taken together, these results suggest that individual differences in a neural circuit related to reward processing underpin human fluid reasoning abilities. (shrink)

Between‐trial effects in Stroop‐like interference tasks are linked to differences in the amount of cognitive control. Trials following an incongruent trial show less interference, an effect suggested to result from the increased control caused by the incongruent previous trial (known as the Gratton effect). In this study, we show that cognitive control not only results in a different amount of interference but also in a different locus of the interference. That is, the stage of the task that shows the most (...) interference changes as a function of the preceding trial. Using computational cognitive modeling, we explain these effects by a difference in the amount of processing of the irrelevant dimension of the stimulus. (shrink)

Cognitive architectures are unified theories of cognition that take the form of computational formalisms. They support computational models that collectively account for large numbers of empirical regularities using small numbers of computational mechanisms. Empirical coverage and parsimony are the most prominent criteria by which architectures are designed and evaluated, but they are not the only ones. This paper considers three additional criteria that have been comparatively undertheorized. (a) Successful architectures possess subjective and intersubjective meaning, making cognition comprehensible to individual cognitive (...) scientists and organizing groups of like-minded cognitive scientists into genuine communities. (b) Successful architectures provide idioms that structure the design and interpretation of computational models. (c) Successful architectures are strange: They make provocative, often disturbing, and ultimately compelling claims about human information processing that demand evaluation. (shrink)

The past 25 years have witnessed an increasing awareness of the importance of cognitive control in the regulation of complex behavior. It now sits alongside attention, memory, language, and thinking as a distinct domain within cognitive psychology. At the same time it permeates each of these sibling domains. This introduction reviews recent work on cognitive control in an attempt to provide a context for the fundamental question addressed within this topic: Is cognitive control to be understood as resulting from the (...) interaction of multiple distinct control processes, or are the phenomena of cognitive control emergent? (shrink)