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Anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortex: who's in control?

Nature Neuroscience volume 3, pages 421–423 (2000)Cite this article

A sophisticated study of error-related brain potentials in patients with prefrontal lesions addresses how we monitor performance and adjust cognitive control based on task demands.

Cognitive control, the ability to guide thought and action in accord with internal intentions, lies at the heart of most higher mental faculties that make us human, such as planning, reasoning, problem solving and language. Prefrontal cortex (PFC) is critically involved in the control of behavior. What is less clear are the structures (possibly including PFC) that are involved in monitoring performance and deciding how and when to allocate control—that is, determining when a goal is not being satisfactorily met and deciding to devote more effort to it. Such a function is needed because cognitive control has limited capacity, which is painfully obvious to anyone who has tried to talk on the phone while reading e-mail. In this situation, you soon lose track of the conversation, and once you recognize this (monitoring function), you give up on the computer and redirect attention to the phone (allocation function)—assuming you are sufficiently interested or polite! The existence of such processes has long been recognized in both empirical work1 and cognitive theory2, but little research has focused on the brain mechanisms involved.

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Figure 1: Model of task used by Gehring and Knight.

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Author notes

  1. Jonathan D. Cohen, Matthew Botvinick and Cameron S. Carter: and with the other authors, in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh, 3811 O'Hara Street, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213, USA.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. the Department of Psychology Princeton University, Green Hall, Princeton, 08544, New Jersey, USA

    Jonathan D. Cohen

  2. the Department of Psychology Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania , USA

    Matthew Botvinick

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  1. Jonathan D. Cohen
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  2. Matthew Botvinick
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  3. Cameron S. Carter
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Cohen, J., Botvinick, M. & Carter, C. Anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortex: who's in control?. Nat Neurosci 3, 421–423 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/74783

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