Cross-task specificity and within-task invariance of cognitive control processes
Yuchen Xiao,
Chien-Chen Chou,
Garth Rees Cosgrove,
Nathan E. Crone,
Scellig Stone,
Joseph R. Madsen,
Ian Reucroft,
Yen-Cheng Shih,
Daniel Weisholtz,
Hsiang-Yu Yu,
William S. Anderson,
Gabriel Kreiman
Affiliations
Yuchen Xiao
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Chien-Chen Chou
Department of Neurology, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan; School of Medicine, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University College of Medicine, Taipei, Taiwan
Garth Rees Cosgrove
Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Nathan E. Crone
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA
Scellig Stone
Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Joseph R. Madsen
Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Ian Reucroft
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA
Yen-Cheng Shih
Department of Neurology, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan; School of Medicine, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University College of Medicine, Taipei, Taiwan
Daniel Weisholtz
Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Hsiang-Yu Yu
Department of Neurology, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan; School of Medicine, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University College of Medicine, Taipei, Taiwan
William S. Anderson
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA
Gabriel Kreiman
Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Center for Brains, Minds and Machines, Cambridge, MA, USA; Corresponding author
Summary: Cognitive control involves flexibly combining multiple sensory inputs with task-dependent goals during decision making. Several tasks involving conflicting sensory inputs and motor outputs have been proposed to examine cognitive control, including the Stroop, Flanker, and multi-source interference task. Because these tasks have been studied independently, it remains unclear whether the neural signatures of cognitive control reflect abstract control mechanisms or specific combinations of sensory and behavioral aspects of each task. To address these questions, we record invasive neurophysiological signals from 16 patients with pharmacologically intractable epilepsy and compare neural responses within and between tasks. Neural signals differ between incongruent and congruent conditions, showing strong modulation by conflicting task demands. These neural signals are mostly specific to each task, generalizing within a task but not across tasks. These results highlight the complex interplay between sensory inputs, motor outputs, and task demands underlying cognitive control processes.
