Extracting core components of cognitive control.

The facility with which humans perform and shift among a wide variety of cognitive tasks seems to indicate a mechanism for entering into a task-dependent mode or set. However, little is known about the neural systems that subserve task control. A recent neuroimaging study by Dosenbach et al. offers a set of novel methodological tools to examine this issue and uncovers new candidate brain regions for a core system that might implement task sets.