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Essay 1: Describe the delta plot technique developed by Ridderinkhof and colleagues to assess response inhibition under conditions of response conflict. Clearly explain, in your own words, the logic behind this technique. Explain how the technique can be used to assess the effect of methylphenidate on cognitive control in attention deficit disorder.
Essay 2: Actions can be involuntarily or automatically evoked by manipulable objects like beer mugs and frying pans, just as words are involuntarily read under certain conditions. According to Bub and Masson the conditions that lead to actions being automatically evoked by handled objects are rather specific; it is not sufficient for the observer to merely attend to an object. Explain the task -- borrowed from the Stroop color-word interference procedure -- that Bub and Masson used to discover the conditions that lead to an object like a beer mug automatically evoking a reach and grasp action. Summarize the results that lead the authors to reject the widely held view that merely attending to an object is sufficient to automatically evoke actions associated with the object. The authors claim that their results “...are consistent with neurophysiological evidence indicating that the cued goal state has a modulatory influence on sensorimotor representations, and that handled objects initially generate competition between neural populations coding for a left or right-handed action that must be resolved before a particular hand is favoured.” Explain in your own words what the authors mean by this claim and how they arrive at this conclusion.
Essay 3: Nowadays, many people use cellphones, ipods, ipads and the like in such a way as to multitask. Some researchers have speculated that all this multitasking has a negative (i.e. harmful) effect on certain aspects of cognitive control. Describe evidence indicating that certain kinds of cognitive control systems are affected by lengthy amounts of practice in media multitasking. According to Ophir, Nass and Wagner, the tendency to become distracted by multiple streams of media could imply a difference in cognitive style rather than a deficit and that future tests of higher-order cognition could reveal benefits. Discuss this idea, and in particular what kinds of benefits might occur given experience in multitasking. How does medial multitasking affect the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)? Reference on ACC: AccandMediaMutlitasking.pdf
Essays 7-11: Choose one topic of interest from the following list that is relevant to an issue in cognitive control. The choices are: (i) the role of emotional regulation in cognitive control (Gray.pdf); (ii) a developmental issue relevant to of Stroop interference (Readingability.pdf); (iii) unconscious versus conscious cognitive control (Heinemann et al.pdf) or (iv) the effect of exercise on mechanisms of cognitive control (Exhaustingexercise.pdf). I have included one article that you may consider adds important new information on your topic of interest. Summarize this article (and if you wish, any related articles that you might find) and indicate why you think this research in particular should be considered a valuable contribution to the literature dealing with cognitive control.
Essay 4: Holroyd and Yeung - 2012_HolroydYeung.pdf - present a new theory of the contribution of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) to cognitive control. They claim that their “...theory accounts for ACC activity in relation to learning and control while simultaneously explaining the effects of ACC damage as disrupting the motivational context supporting the production of goal-directed action sequences.” Explain this theory and how it accounts for the role of the ACC in cognitive control and goal-directed action.
Essay 5: According to Rounis and Humphreys - Limbapraxiandaffordancecompetition.pdf - competing motor affordances may play a role in limb apraxia. Describe what is meant by “limb apraxia”. Explain what is meant by affordance competition and how this idea helps clarify the nature of limb apraxia.
Essay 6: According to some evidence, bilinguals have better cognitive control than monolinguals. Discuss this evidence - CognitiveControlbilinguals.pdf.
Essay 12: An object in working memory depicting a graspable object like a beer mug can influence the entire trajectory of a reach and grasp action. Describe the methodology yielding evidence in support of this claim (Embodiedeffects.pdf).
Essay 13: According to Memelink and Hommel - Intentionalweighting.pdf - the weighting of visual features driven by our task set or intentions is a basic mechanism of cognitive control. This idea is linked to the Theory of Event Coding (TEC). Describe the relationship between this theory (TEC), intentional weighting and mechanisms of cognitive control.
Essay 14: Todd Braver - Braver.pdf - distinguishes between two basic mechanisms implicated in cognitive control. Describe how this theory “.... provides a coherent explanation of three sources of cognitive control variation – intra-individual, inter-individual and between-groups – in terms of proac- tive versus reactive control biases.
Essay 15: Words that refer to graspable objects - like cellphone and spray-can - evoke multiple action representations. Discuss the evidence in support of this claim by Bub and Masson (2012) - reference is BM12.pdf - and then consider the following question. Does sentence context (for example, the angry lawyer savagely kicked the calculator) work to modulate the activation of different types of grasps evoked by a word like calculator? If so, in what way? Reference is MBW08.pdf
Essay 16: The Stroop task has been widely used to study psychopathology. Williams, Mathews and MacLeod (1996) provide an overview of this literature -WilliamsEmoStroop1996.pdf - and they relate the evidence to the computational model of the Stroop developed by Cohen, Dunbar and McClelland (1990). Based on the analysis provided by Williams, Mathews and MacLeod, critically evaluate the following claim: “....the emotional Stroop task is fulfilling much of its early promise as a way of establishing the extent to which attentional bias is involved in the maintenance of emotional psychopathology.”
