Deck 12: Cognitive Control

Question 1

The ventromedial zone is also known as the)

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

Answer 1

D

Question 2

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.

Answer 2

B

Question 3

Cognitive control is NOT involved in which of the following?

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

Answer 3

D

Question 4

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 5

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 6

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 7

You are driving in a car. Which of the following stops will require the most working memory?

A) stopping at a supermarket
B) stopping at home
C) stopping at a friends home
D) stopping at a business you have never visited before

Question 8

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.

Question 9

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 10

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 11

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 12

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

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

Question 13

Cognitive control is often associated with

A) goal-oriented behavior.
B) decision making.
C) cognitive flexibility.
D) all of the above.

Question 14

Which of the following is true about the prefrontal cortex?

A) The prefrontal cortex seems to play a role in working memory but not in long-term storage of information.
B) The prefrontal cortex seems to play a role in long-term storage of information but not in working memory.
C) The prefrontal cortex is important for both working memory and long-term storage of information.
D) The prefrontal cortex is not essential for either working memory or long-term storage of information.

Question 15

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 16

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 17

Working memory has been called the of the mind.

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

Question 18

Whereas 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 19

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 20

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 21

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 22

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 23

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 24

In the task-switching experiment between 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 above

Question 25

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 an) paradigm.

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

Question 26

Prediction error is NOT correlated with which of the following:

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

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 28

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 29

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 30

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 31

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 32

Schema control units are

A) mental representations of semantic networks.
B) stored autobiographical information.
C) stored information about the temporal order of events.
D) mental representations of possible responses.

Question 33

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 34

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 35

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 36

Primary reinforcers involve whereas secondary reinforcers do not.

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

Question 37

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 38

You encounter a bear that 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 39

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

A) habitual ; automatic
B) automatic ; controlled
C) controlled ; automatic
D) none of the above

Question 40

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 41

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 42

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

Question 43

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

Question 44

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

Question 45

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

Question 46

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 47

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 48

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 49

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

Question 50

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 51

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 52

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

Question 53

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

Question 54

Knowledge about the context in which previous learning took place is referred to as recency memory.

Question 55

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 56

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

Question 57

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 58

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

Question 59

The lateral prefrontal cortex is important for working memory tasks.

Question 60

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

Question 61

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

Question 62

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

Question 63

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

Question 64

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 65

Describe the components of valuation.

Question 66

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