'Cognitive control' refers to the ability to flexibly adapt one’s behavior in the pursuit of an internal goal. As is evident from this rather global definition, cognitive control does not represent a unitary process but rather refers to the orchestration of a collection of cognitive processes. These include maintaining and 'shielding’ a current goal in working memory; setting up, maintaining, and implementing a task strategy for achieving that goal; monitoring the outcome of one’s actions to ascertain that the stated goal is being achieved; and adjusting one’s behavior if the chosen task strategy is not successful. In practice, most current work in Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience on this topic focuses primarily on the issues of performance monitoring and adjustments in behavior in response to internal or external signs of trouble (e.g., errors in performance), or on the reconfiguration of task sets following external cues (i.e., task switching). The major model domain for understanding behavioral effects and neural substrates of cognitive control processes has been the regulation of visual selective attention.

In our Lab, we typically combine functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with experimental protocols that manipulate aspects of classic selective attention 'interference’ tasks (such as the Stroop task, the Eriksen flanker task, or the Simon task) in order to isolate neural correlates of different components of cognitive control. For example, we assess 'sequence effects’ in interference tasks, which allow us to tap into online performance adjustments in response to particular stimulus conditions, and to tease apart performance monitoring from subsequent adjustment processes. Another useful way to reveal the neural architecture of cognitive control processes is to factorially combine different 'triggers’ of control processes, such as different types of interference effects or different types of external cues for performance adjustment, in order determine whether different triggers lead to the recruitment of shared or distinct neural control mechanisms.

We are also interested in what might be called 'affective control', that is, the processes involved in regulating emotional responses, again particularly in the context of visual selective attention. Stimuli that signal potential threats to the organism (such as a nearby fearful face) tend to trigger an emotional physiological response and attract our attention. This process is not entirely automatic, however, since we can override these reactions to a degree when we are in a context that signals that there really is no immediate danger to our wellbeing (contrast your reaction to a murder scene in a movie with what your reaction would be like when witnessing such as scene in reality). The neural mechanisms that allow us to overcome quasi-instinctual emotional reactions may be crucial to understanding a number of psychopathologies, particularly the Anxiety Disorders. We are investigating two main aspects of the interaction between emotion and attention. First, we are interested in delineating the neural mechanisms by which motivational factors (both aversive and appetitive) guide spatial attention, and second, we investigate the way in which attentional control mechanisms 'shield' ongoing task performance from intrusion by affective responses to task-irrelevant emotional stimuli.