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)

This chapter shows that the frontal lobes play an important role in integrating information from many other areas of the brain, and are crucially involved in its manipulation for purposes such as learning, comprehension, and reasoning. Given that these are precisely the roles attributed to working memory, it seems likely that the functional and anatomical approaches will continue to develop synergistically, as the complex functions assigned to working memory are tackled using an increasingly sophisticated armory of new psychological and neurobiological (...) techniques. (shrink)