Dorsolateral prefrontal activity supports a cognitive space organization of cognitive control.

Abstract

Cognitive control resolves conflicts between task-relevant and -irrelevant information to enable goal-directed behavior. As conflicts can arise from different sources (e.g., sensory input, internal representations), how a limited set of cognitive control processes can effectively address diverse conflicts remains a major challenge. Based on the cognitive space theory, different conflicts can be parameterized and represented as distinct points in a (low-dimensional) cognitive space, which can then be resolved by a limited set of cognitive control processes working along the dimensions. It leads to a hypothesis that conflicts similar in their sources are also represented similarly in the cognitive space. We designed a task with five types of conflicts that could be conceptually parameterized. Both human performance and fMRI activity patterns in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex support that different types of conflicts are organized based on their similarity, thus suggesting cognitive space as a principle for representing conflicts.