Executive control in attention and decision making

Executive control refers to the cognitive processes that enable individuals to plan, organize, and guide their behavior in accordance with their goals and intentions. It plays a critical role in both attention and decision making. In terms of attention, executive control is responsible for selectively focusing on relevant information while filtering out distractions. This involves inhibiting irrelevant information and maintaining attentional focus on the task at hand. In decision making, executive control is involved in a number of processes, including goal setting, weighing pros and cons, considering alternatives, and making choices based on long-term outcomes rather than short-term rewards.

Overall, executive control is a crucial aspect of cognitive function that helps individuals regulate their behavior and make adaptive decisions in complex and changing environments. Executive control of attention involves the engagement of complex mental operations during the detection and resolution of conflicts between competing mental processes (Posner and Petersen, 1990; Fan et al., 2003; Mackie et al., 2013). Achieving dynamic control of behavior in complex environments requires a mechanism that coordinates the processing of information across different modalities.

Positive correlations of conflict effects among the visual and auditory tasks indicate that shared executive control resources are employed across the two modalities. Executive control is typically thought of as a higher-level function not tied to any particular modality (Mackie et al., 2013; Fan, 2014). It is integrative across modalities, allowing for flexible responses to complex situations. Supra-modal executive control, along with modality-specific alerting and orienting, supports the idea of a hierarchy of functions among the three attentional networks, with executive control being at higher-order relative to the alerting and orienting functions (Wang and Fan, 2007).

There is a possible adaptive benefit of modality-independent executive control of attention. Having controllers within each modality would reduce efficiency because additional cross modality coordination at a higher level would still be required. The observed correlated effects between the visual and auditory tasks indicate that executive control recruits shared sources across modalities. Further, we observed that the conflict effect was highly correlated with overall RT across tasks, indicating a possible common latent source.

Best,

Laura Zukerman

Owner and Founder At The Goddess Bibles

A Memoir By Laura Zukerman

Becoming Your Inner Goddess/God

Goddess/God On Fire ❤

Reference : https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389

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