executive processes
Terms
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- five critical cognitive processes
- executive attention, switching executive attention, ignoring or inhibiting info, scheduling a sequence of activities, monitoring performance
- executive processes
- processes that modulate the operation of other processes and that are responsible for the coordination of mental acitivity so that a particular goal is achieved.
- closed head injury
- injury caused by an external bump that does no pierce the skull, causes frontal lobe damage
- phineas gage
- first insight into the frontal lobe's importance in higher level cognition. after brain damage, major personality changes, irresponisble, impulsive
- prefontrol cortex (PFC)
- anterior part of the frontal lobe, the part of the brain responsible for executive actions, extremely large in humans, receives info from virtually all perceptual and motor cortical areas and subcortical areas.
- frontal executive hypothesis
- theory that every executive process is primarily mediated by the PFC.
- stroop task
- names of colors are presented in colored in and the participant's task is to name the ink color and ignore the color name. sometimes the name and print color are compatible, as when the word blue is printed in that color. other times the color name and the print color are incompatible, as when the word black is printed in blue
- executive attention
- directs subsequent processing, used whenever multiple mental representations in working memory or multiple processes operating on representations, comkpete for the control of cognition and behavior, determines which competing processes gain control
- stimulus-response compatibility
- a measure of the degree to which the assignment of the correct response to a stimulus is consistent with the way people would act naturally
- compatibility effect
- increase in response speed when in a compatible condition, stimulus is on the left, respond with the left and vice versa, automatic processing is involved. when the stimulus and response match, very little processing required.
- neural network representation of conflict in processing
- three layers: input layer, hidden layer, response layer. associations with nodes vary in weight.
- attentional controller
- contains an indication of the current goal and adds activation to nodes relevant to that goal.
- conflict monitor
- monitors the amount of conflict between the nodes at the response level and as conflict increases, the monitor engages executive attention
- anterior cingulate
- mediates the conflict monitor while the PFC mediates executve attention
- front to back
- type of processing that is the heart of models of executive attention
- fixed versus variable categories
- fixed categories contain things that are fairly specific, like the category of quarters. all are very similar. variable categories contain things that can change, like a pizza.
- automatic process
- one that can be initiated without intention, that operates very rapidly, and can operate without conciousness
- nonautomatic process
- requires intention, is relatively slow, and requires consciousness for its operation
- consciousness
- a state that is accompanied by a bertain phenomenology - an experience - and that experience presumably reflects certain types of info processing.
- switching attention
- the focus of attention is moved from one entity to another
- switching cost
- time difference involved with switching attention. occurs because executive processes must update and change goals/rules
- response inhibition
- the suppression of a partially prepared reponse
- a not b task
- children see object placed in spot a, reach for it, rewarded. see object placed in b. still go for a, even if looking at b. cannot inhibit the response. the PFC has not developed enough.
- sequencing
- coding information about the order of events in working memory.
- three ways of sequencing information
- form directed associations between every pair, attach order tags, code order info based on familiarity.
- monitoring
- the assessment of one's perforance on a task while the task is performed