CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Beijing, China.
Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
Elife. 2024 Mar 6;12:RP87126. doi: 10.7554/eLife.87126.
Cognitive control resolves conflicts between task-relevant and -irrelevant information to enable goal-directed behavior. As conflicts can arise from different sources (e.g., sensory input, internal representations), how a limited set of cognitive control processes can effectively address diverse conflicts remains a major challenge. Based on the cognitive space theory, different conflicts can be parameterized and represented as distinct points in a (low-dimensional) cognitive space, which can then be resolved by a limited set of cognitive control processes working along the dimensions. It leads to a hypothesis that conflicts similar in their sources are also represented similarly in the cognitive space. We designed a task with five types of conflicts that could be conceptually parameterized. Both human performance and fMRI activity patterns in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex support that different types of conflicts are organized based on their similarity, thus suggesting cognitive space as a principle for representing conflicts.
认知控制解决任务相关和不相关信息之间的冲突，以实现目标导向的行为。由于冲突可能来自不同的来源（例如，感觉输入、内部表示），因此，如何使用有限的认知控制过程有效地解决各种冲突仍然是一个主要挑战。基于认知空间理论，可以将不同的冲突参数化为（低维）认知空间中的不同点，然后通过沿着维度工作的有限的认知控制过程来解决这些冲突。这就产生了一个假设，即来源相似的冲突在认知空间中也以相似的方式表示。我们设计了一个具有五种类型冲突的任务，这些冲突可以在概念上进行参数化。人类的表现和右侧背外侧前额叶皮层的 fMRI 活动模式都支持不同类型的冲突是根据它们的相似性组织起来的，这表明认知空间是一种表示冲突的原则。
