The decision to engage cognitive control is driven by expected reward-value: neural and behavioral evidence.

ABSTRACT: Cognitive control is a fundamental skill reflecting the active use of task-rules to guide behavior and suppress inappropriate automatic responses. Prior work has traditionally used paradigms in which subjects are told when to engage cognitive control. Thus, surprisingly little is known about the factors that influence individuals' initial decision of whether or not to act in a reflective, rule-based manner. To examine this, we took three classic cognitive control tasks (Stroop, Wisconsin Card Sorting Task, Go/No-Go task) and created novel 'free-choice' versions in which human subjects were free to select an automatic, pre-potent action, or an action requiring rule-based cognitive control, and earned varying amounts of money based on their choices. Our findings demonstrated that subjects' d

SUBMITTER: Dixon ML 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3526643 | biostudies-literature | 2012

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature