The prefrontal cortex has long been suspected to play an important role in cognitive control, in the ability to orchestrate thought and action in accordance with internal goals. Its neural basis, however, has remained a mystery. Here, we propose that cognitive control stems from the active maintenance of patterns of activity in the prefrontal cortex that represent goals and the means to achieve them. They provide bias signals to other brain structures whose net effect is to guide the flow of (...) activity along neural pathways that establish the proper mappings between inputs, internal states, and outputs needed to perform a given task. We review neurophysiological, neurobiological, neuroimaging, and computational studies that support this theory and discuss its implications as well as further issues to be addressed. (shrink)

Consider the following three situations: learning to perform a complex skill such as gymastics (a stunning demonstration of which participants to ICP 2004 experienced during the opening ceremony), learning a complex game such as the ancient Chinese game of Weichi (more widely known as Go), or learning natural language. What these situations have in common, beyond the sheer complexity of the required skills, is the fact that most of what we learn about each appears to proceed in a manner that (...) does not depend so much on the acquisition of explicit, declarative information or on the deployment of intentional strategies, but instead critically depends on repeated practice: Developing the skills needed to execute complex movements in gymnastics, to. (shrink)

Over the past decade, many findings in cognitive about the contents of consciousness: we will not address neuroscience have resulted in the view that selective what might be called the ‘enabling factors’ for conscious- attention, working memory and cognitive control ness (e.g. appropriate neuromodulation from the brain- stem, etc.). involve competition between widely distributed rep-.