A Systems-Level Perspective on Attention and Cognitive Control (Cohen, 2004)

Guided Activation, Adaptive Gating, Conflict Monitoring, and Exploitation versus Exploration

with Gary Aston-Jones, Mark S. Gilzenrat

http://concepts.psych.wisc.edu/Classes/711/Applications/CohenETAL04.control.pdf

"The goal of this work is to provide a mechanistically explicit account of how processes that give rise to the phenomena of attention and control are implemented in the brain."

""the occurrence of conflict provides a natural signal of the need for attentional control."

JLJ - "Attend" to my notes on this interesting paper on attention itself to see if it interests you. Sigh - the many unfamiliar abbrevistions, some of which I have defined below, will cause most people to stop reading the text.

Attention in my mind is a two part process -

first, our predicament suggests to us what cues in the environment we ought to attend to, and
second, we attend to these cues and jump to the conclusions which out of necessity are suggested.

All of this depends on a working library of tricks that ought to work, and the cues which indicate that there might be success if they are tried. At any given point in the life of a human adult, there is virtually no way that they can be functioning in society without developing, perhaps through the school of hard knocks, a library of tricks that intelligently suggest to us that if we are in situation X and see a certain cue Y, a certain action Z might be tried, in order to produce W effect in the predicament. We attend, because our coping scheme which we feel is necessary and appropriate calls for attention - we are executing the scheme, and it calls for attention in thus and such a way. Attention should not be looked at in isolation - we attend because...

PFC - prefrontal cortex (control - guides the flow of activity along task-relevant pathways)

ACC - anterior cingulate cortex (monitors for conflicts)

LC - locus coeruleus - responsible for most of the norepinephrine (NE) released in the brain

NE - norepinephrine

VTA - ventral tegmental area (adaptive gating mechanism)

p.71 An understanding of attention is arguably one of the most important goals of the cognitive sciences and yet also has proven to be one of the most elusive.

p.71 attention is the emergent property of the cognitive system that allows it to successfully process some sources of information to the exclusion of others, in the service of achieving some goals to the exclusion of others.

p.75 it is not clear that any cognitive process can occur entirely independently of attention.

p.76 we can define attention, in the most general way, as the modulatory influence that representations of one type have on selecting which (or to what degree) representations of other types are processed, that is, how representations of one type guide the flow of activity among other types. Thus, the representation of an object may influence which sensory features are processed

p.77 The first requirement for a system of control is that it be able to actively maintain representations of task demand, rules, or goals over temporally extended periods (e.g., during performance of the task), in the absence of external support.

p.78 A second critical property is that the system must be able not only to maintain task representations but also to update these appropriately.

p.80 The primary function of attention is to support the processing of task-appropriate sources of information against competition from interfering sources. Put another way, the role of attention is to reduce conflicts in processing. Therefore, the occurrence of conflict provides a natural signal of the need for attentional control.

p.83 What information can the system use to determine whether it should exploit (LC phasic mode) or explore (LC tonic mode)?

p.85 The goal of this work is to provide a mechanistically explicit account of how processes that give rise to the phenomena of attention and control are implemented in the brain. The hypotheses reviewed suggest that control relies on the activation of appropriate representations in the PFC. These representations can be thought of as task demands, rules, intentions, or goals that direct behavior to produce desired outcomes by biasing processing and guiding the flow of activity along pathways responsible for mapping inputs to desired outputs.