Deck 12: Cognitive Control

Question 1

Which of the following processes would LEAST involve cognitive control?

A)playing "Simon Says" with your niece and nephew
B)jumping rope with your niece and nephew, after not having jumped rope for at least10 years
C)choosing what kind of pizzas to order based on input from a group of several people
D)not letting yourself have another glass of wine, even though you want to have one

Answer 1

B

Question 2

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is sometimes thought of as being associated with cognitive control deficits. Which piece of evidence best supports this?

A)ADHD stimulant medications have a particularly high affinity for frontal lobe structures involved in cognitive control.
B)ADHD stimulant medications work by increasing attentional selection, which facilitates cognitive control.
C)Attention and cognitive control are more or less synonymous.
D)The interplay between attention and cognitive control is much stronger in children with ADHD than in children who do not have ADHD.

Answer 2

A

Question 3

Focal injuries of the prefrontal cortex generally produce all of the following cognitive changes or symptoms EXCEPT

A)deficits in planning complex behaviors.
B)perseveration in responding.
C)fluent aphasia.
D)disruption of working memory.

Answer 3

C

Question 4

Three main subdivisions of the prefrontal cortex are the

A)primary motor cortex, lateral prefrontal cortex, and frontal pole.
B)lateral prefrontal cortex, frontal pole, and medial frontal cortex.
C)frontal pole, medial frontal cortex, and anterior cingulate.
D)medial frontal cortex, anterior cingulate, and primary motor cortex.

Question 5

The information that you are currently thinking about, perceiving, or using to guide responding is held in this type of memory store.

A)source memory
B)anterograde memory
C)working memory
D)implicit memory

Question 6

Cognitive control is often associated with

A)goal-oriented behavior.
B)decision making.
C)cognitive flexibility.
D)All of the answer options are correct.

Question 7

A patient with a frontal lobe lesion kneels and prays when watching another person do the same thing in the middle of the cafeteria. This is an example of

A)deficits in planning complex behaviors.
B)perseveration in responding.
C)utilization behavior.
D)disruption of working memory.

Question 8

A monkey that has previously received a lesion in the lateral prefrontal cortex is shown two food wells, each of which is covered by a marked stimulus card: As the monkey watches, a food reward is placed into the left well and then both wells are covered. If the monkey is now allowed to retrieve the food reward immediately, it will

A)correctly select the left food well.
B)select from either of the food wells randomly.
C)incorrectly select the right well.
D)no longer respond to either of the food wells.

Question 9

Working memory has been called the ________ of the mind.

A)blackboard
B)bookshelves
C)filing cabinet
D)staple gun

Question 10

Which of the following best describes a real-life example of the delayed-response task?

A)After reading and studying on Sunday afternoon, you take a cognitive neuroscience exam on Monday morning.
B)After looking up the phone number of a local pizza place, you walk across the room to the telephone and begin dialing it.
C)After staring intently at a bright streetlamp, you notice that there is an afterimage of the light even when you move your eyes to another location.
D)Every time you visit the doctor to receive a shot, she gives you a cherry lollipop. After several visits you find that the taste of cherry lollipops makes you anxious.

Question 11

Lesions of the lateral prefrontal cortex disrupt ________ memory but not ________ memory.

A)long-term; working
B)long-term; short-term
C)working; long-term
D)working; short-term

Question 12

A monkey is taught that food is associated with a stimulus card that has a star on it. After training, the animal receives a lesion to the lateral prefrontal cortex. The monkey's memory for the food-stimulus card association is then tested by presenting the animal with the two stimulus cards diagrammed here. How will the monkey now respond?

A)The monkey will remember the correct response and choose stimulus card 1 to earn a food reward.
B)The memory trace left by the training period will be disrupted by the surgery, and the monkey will randomly select among the stimulus cards.
C)The monkey will no longer be able to retrieve old memories, even if the representations are intact, and will randomly select among the stimulus cards.
D)The monkey will no longer be able to recognize visual patterns and will randomly select among the stimulus cards.

Question 13

Which of the following statements best describes the anatomical connectivity of the prefrontal lobes to the rest of the brain?

A)Most synapses in the prefrontal cortex originate from subcortical regions rather than from other cortical regions in the brain.
B)Almost all connections in this area carry inputs from other regions of the cortex rather than from subcortical regions.
C)Connections in this region tend to carry inputs from other parts of the prefrontal cortex rather than from other lobes of the brain.
D)There are extensive projections to and from the prefrontal cortex to all other lobes of the brain.

Question 14

The most caudal part of the frontal lobe contains the ________ region.

A)lateral prefrontal cortex
B)premotor
C)anterior cingulate
D)primary motor

Question 15

You are driving around town. Which of the following stops will require the most working memory?

A)stopping at a frequently visited supermarket
B)stopping at home
C)stopping at a friend's home
D)stopping at a business you have never visited before

Question 16

The statement "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is discussed in multiple places in this chapter. Which of the following, if true, would be inconsistent with that statement?

A)Squirrel monkeys and dogs tend to exhibit poorer cognitive control than chimpanzees.
B)The frontal lobes of dogs are fully developed within their first 2 years of life.
C)The frontal lobes of chimpanzees become fully developed at a younger age than the frontal lobes of squirrel monkeys or dogs.
D)Humans exhibit better cognitive control than chimpanzees, but our frontal lobes take longer to develop.

Question 17

John is unable to carry on the most rudimentary conversations. Whenever someone changes the subject he persists on the same topic for several minutes. Eventually, people simply leave him alone, talking to himself. John has

A)deficits in planning complex behaviors.
B)perseveration in responding.
C)fluent aphasia.
D)disruption of working memory.

Question 18

The human analog of the delayed-response task that is used as a test of cognitive development in human infants is the ________ task.

A)delayed-reward
B)object permanence
C)sensorimotor development
D)conservation of quantity

Question 19

The ventromedial zone is also known as (the)

A)primary motor cortex.
B)Wernicke's area.
C)anterior cingulate cortex.
D)orbitofrontal cortex.

Question 20

Cognitive control is NOT involved in which of the following?

A)goal-oriented behavior
B)decision making
C)cognitive flexibility
D)implicit memory

Question 21

Action-outcome decisions involve a more ________ form of processing, whereas stimulus-response decisions are more ________.

A)habitual; automatic
B)automatic; controlled
C)controlled; automatic
D)None of the answer options is correct.

Question 22

Neuroimaging experiments have demonstrated that working memory engages the

A)prefrontal cortex to a larger degree than any other cortical area.
B)anterior cingulate to a larger degree than any other cortical area.
C)prefrontal cortex and more posterior brain areas involved in perception and mental representation.
D)anterior cingulate and more posterior brain areas involved in perception and mental representation.

Question 23

Imagine that a frontal lobe patient meets a very good friend and his family doctor. Which of the two would this patient be able to engage more easily in a short conversation?

A)the very good friend
B)the family doctor
C)both would be equally easy
D)both would be equally difficult

Question 24

People with frontal lobe injuries and control participants were asked to figure out a way to clean a floor when there are no towels. Which of the following statements would be associated with frontal lobe patients and not controls?

A)"The floor is dirty."
B)"Just take your blouse off and clean it with that."
C)"We can clean the floor with the soles of our shoes."
D)"We need a cloth or paper to clean the floor."

Question 25

The idea that the prefrontal cortex filters out and inhibits irrelevant information is supported by the ERP findings of Knight and Grabowecky (1995), who found that patients with prefrontal lesions produced ________ in response to ignored tones during a listening task.

A)smaller evoked potentials
B)larger evoked potentials
C)evoked potentials that were longer in duration
D)evoked potentials that were briefer in duration

Question 26

With which of the following is prediction error NOT correlated?

A)the difference between what is expected and what is obtained
B)changes in dopamine activity
C)updating of valuation of information and learning
D)the unconditioned stimulus

Question 27

Which of the following is NOT a gradient along which the prefrontal cortex is organized?

A)anterior-posterior
B)ventral-dorsal
C)left-right
D)lateral-medial

Question 28

Thompson-Schill and colleagues (1997, 1998) conducted an experiment in which participants generated an appropriate verb in response to a presented noun. They found that the processing of nouns such as rope, which have many semantically associated verbs, elicited ________ activity in the inferior frontal cortex than did nouns such as scissors, which do not. This result supports the ________ hypothesis of inferior frontal lobe function.

A)greater; working memory retrieval
B)greater; selection
C)less; working memory retrieval
D)less; selection

Question 29

Which of the following findings, if true, would best argue in favor of the parallel processing model of multi-tasking, as opposed to the task-switching model?

A)Participants' performance in the dual task condition improved dramatically over time with practice.
B)Brain activity increased throughout frontal cortex in the dual task condition with practice.
C)Frontal connectivity between brain areas involved in each task increased with time and practice.
D)Participants' improvements over time in the dual task condition were highly correlated with their improvements on each individual task.

Question 30

A person who has difficulty with "recency memory" tasks would have the most difficulty with which of the following?

A)remembering a list of items to purchase at the market
B)setting a table with forks, knives, and spoons
C)recognizing the difference between two similar ingredients
D)entering the ingredients for a recipe in the correct order

Question 31

While the ________ will be most active during the encoding of a face stimulus, the ________ will be active during the delay period.

A)prefrontal gyrus; fusiform gyrus
B)fusiform gyrus; prefrontal cortex
C)anterior cingulate; hippocampus
D)hippocampus; anterior cingulate

Question 32

________ theories describe what people ought to do, whereas ________ theories describe what people actually do.

A)Normative; descriptive
B)Descriptive; normative
C)Decision-making; goal-oriented
D)Goal-oriented; decision-making

Question 33

An experiment that requires participants to respond based on one goal, such as naming digits, on some trials and another goal, such as naming letters, on other trials is an example of a(n) ________ paradigm.

A)error-monitoring
B)task-switching
C)Stroop
D)contention-scheduling

Question 34

You conduct a single-cell recording study of a lateral prefrontal cortical cell while an animal performs a delayed-response task. Which of the following response profiles best matches the behavior of the cell if it is primarily involved in working memory function? (Each vertical line represents an action potential.)

A)
B)
C)
D)

Question 35

In the task-switching experiment involving a digit task and a letter task, a digit or letter response was indicated by a word or by a color. Which of these conditions was particularly problematic when switching between digits and letters for frontal lobe patients?

A)letters indicated by words
B)digits indicated by colors
C)digits indicated by words
D)None of the answer options is correct.

Question 36

Ventromedial prefrontal cortex involves ________ valuation, whereas dorsolateral prefrontal cortex involves more ________ valuation.

A)controlled; automatic
B)automatic; controlled
C)long-term; short-term
D)short-term; long-term

Question 37

Which patient group is most likely to be impaired on a task in which one must decide which of two pictures was seen most recently?

A)patients with frontal lobe injuries
B)patients with temporal lobe injuries
C)patients with parietal lobe injuries
D)patients with occipital lobe injuries

Question 38

Primary reinforcers involve ________, whereas secondary reinforcers do not.

A)acquired value
B)no value
C)some value
D)survival value

Question 39

You encounter a bear, which triggers an emotional response. Which of the following areas would not show increased dopamine in the mesolimbic pathway?

A)amygdala
B)hippocampus
C)anterior cingulate cortex
D)dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

Question 40

One conceptualization of the prefrontal cortex, offered by Shimamura (2000), which could explain the seemingly disparate set of impairments associated with damage to this area, is that

A)one underlying function of the prefrontal lobes is to select the information that is most task-relevant.
B)separate regions within the prefrontal cortex are specialized for these different functions.
C)the prefrontal cortex is not directly involved in memory but is a relay station for information processing that occurs in the temporal lobes.
D)information in the prefrontal cortex is temporarily represented in other neural sites, including the basal ganglia, during working memory.

Question 41

People with frontal lobe lesions are often impaired in organizing and segregating events in memory.

Question 42

Which aspects of memory are compromised following damage to the frontal lobe? Which aspects are relatively unimpaired?

Question 43

For situations in which no routine procedure can be used to generate an appropriate response, which type of mechanism is used to select the best schema control unit for translation into action?

A)the somatic marker hypothesis
B)utilization behavior
C)the supervisory attentional system
D)source encoding

Question 44

In a delayed response task, participants were asked to look at faces or scenes or engage in passive viewing. Which of the following results distinguished older adults from young adults when viewing faces relative to passive viewing?

A)The older adults showed reduced activation in the fusiform face area.
B)The older adults showed reduced activation in the parahippocampal place area.
C)The young adults showed reduced activation in the fusiform face area.
D)The young adults showed reduced activation in the parahippocampal place area.

Question 45

You have just been introduced to two people, one of whom suffers from a frontal lobe syndrome and the other from visual agnosia. However, you do not know which person is which. Describe some questions or tasks that you could use to determine which person has the frontal lobe syndrome and which one has visual agnosia.

Question 46

Although the prefrontal cortex is not essential for working memory, it is particularly important for the storage of associative knowledge.

Question 47

At any given time, many different schema control units may be activated. However, we can rarely carry out more than one unit at a time and must select the most appropriate one to translate into action. The units are mutually inhibitory, and only the most activated one wins the competition for expression. This type of selection mechanism is called

A)the supervisory attentional system.
B)contention scheduling.
C)the somatic marker hypothesis.
D)utilization behavior.

Question 48

Dynamic filtering is one view of the prefrontal cortex, in which this area is a repository of representations and selects information most relevant to the current task.

Question 49

The key function of the inferior temporal lobe is to evaluate response conflict.

Question 50

Which of the following is NOT a situation that you would expect to engage the supervisory attentional system?

A)one that engages a specific schema control unit
B)one that requires planning or decision making
C)one that requires error detection
D)one that is difficult

Question 51

In a stop-signal task, participants are asked to

A)choose between two responses but abort their response when signaled to do so.
B)identify the color (red, yellow, or green) in which color words have been written.
C)sort cards into piles but change the sorting rule when the stop signal appears.
D)drive a virtual car through crowded London streets, obeying all traffic signals.

Question 52

The lateral prefrontal cortex is important for working memory tasks.

Question 53

Switching tasks requires maintenance but not manipulation of information in working memory.

Question 54

Hypothetically, which of the following would represent a potential consequence of a population of children whose frontal lobes were far more developed than neurotypical children?

A)They would be more impulsive.
B)They would be more cognitively inflexible.
C)They would be less goal-oriented in their behavior.
D)They would have more difficulty multi-tasking.

Question 55

The error-related negativity (ERN) has been localized to the anterior cingulate cortex.

Question 56

In general, increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex has been observed when participants perform tasks that have any of the following properties EXCEPT:

A)The task requires planning and decision making.
B)The task involves well-learned or automatic responses.
C)The task is likely to require error correction.
D)The task requires a response that competes with another strong habitual response.

Question 57

Prefrontal areas are likely a temporary repository for representations accessed from other neural sites.

Question 58

Which of the following situations would be most likely to engage the anterior cingulate cortex?

A)A waiter walks over to your table at a restaurant and holds an open menu in front of you.
B)You walk into the elevator of your apartment building and press the button for your floor.
C)You enter your classroom and find someone sitting in your usual seat.
D)A good friend asks you to remind him of your telephone number.

Question 59

Appropriate goal-oriented behavior is typically described as stimulus-driven.

Question 60

The supervisory attentional system, which seems to be localized to the ________ in the brain, becomes active during the Stroop task because this task requires ________.

A)orbitofrontal cortex; a response (vocalizing a perceived color) that competes with a strong habitual response (reading)
B)orbitofrontal cortex; a response (reading) that competes with a strong habitual response (vocalizing a perceived color)
C)anterior cingulate cortex; a response (reading) that competes with a strong habitual response (vocalizing a perceived color)
D)anterior cingulate cortex; a response (vocalizing a perceived color) that competes with a strong habitual response (reading)

Question 61

Describe the supervisory attentional system. What brain area is thought to be involved? Describe neuroimaging studies that support your view.

Question 62

Provide an example of a delayed-response task. How has this task informed our understanding of the prefrontal cortex?

Question 63

What anatomical gradients have been proposed to account for frontal-lobe function?

Question 64

How do the ventromedial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices differ in terms of valuation? Give an example.

Question 65

Is there more than one decision system? Provide evidence to support your view.

Question 66

You need to develop a plan for cleaning your room. Describe how a frontal lobe patient would struggle with this task.

Question 67

In what ways might we consider drug addiction to be an issue of cognitive control? In what ways might this characterization be problematic? What result would you expect to find if you extended cognitive control experiments to people who chronically use drugs?

Question 68

Imagine that a frontal lobe patient meets a very good friend and his family doctor. Describe how the patient's conversation would differ between the two. Is this similar or different to the way in which a person without frontal lobe damage would communicate with them?

Question 69

Describe the components of valuation.