Badre David
Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, Brown University, Box 1978, Providence, RI 02912-1978, USA.
Trends Cogn Sci. 2008 May;12(5):193-200. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2008.02.004. Epub 2008 Apr 9.
Cognitive control supports flexible behavior by selecting actions that are consistent with our goals and appropriate for our environment. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) has an established role in cognitive control, and research on the functional organization of PFC promises to contribute to our understanding of the architecture of control. A recently popular hypothesis is that the rostro-caudal axis of PFC supports a control hierarchy whereby posterior-to-anterior PFC mediates progressively abstract, higher-order control. This review discusses evidence for a rostro-caudal gradient of function in PFC and the theories proposed to account for these results, including domain generality in working memory, relational complexity, the temporal organization of behavior and abstract representational hierarchy. Distinctions among these frameworks are considered as a basis for future research.
认知控制通过选择与我们的目标一致且适合我们所处环境的行动来支持灵活行为。前额叶皮层（PFC）在认知控制中具有既定作用，对PFC功能组织的研究有望增进我们对控制架构的理解。最近一个流行的假说是，PFC的前后轴支持一种控制层级，即从后到前的PFC介导逐渐抽象的、更高阶的控制。本综述讨论了PFC中功能的前后梯度的证据以及为解释这些结果而提出的理论，包括工作记忆中的领域一般性、关系复杂性、行为的时间组织和抽象表征层级。这些框架之间的区别被视为未来研究的基础。
