Cognitive control: componential or emergent?

Abstract

The past 25 years have witnessed an increasing awareness of the importance of cognitive control in the regulation of complex behavior. It now sits alongside attention, memory, language, and thinking as a distinct domain within cognitive psychology. At the same time it permeates each of these sibling domains. This introduction reviews recent work on cognitive control in an attempt to provide a context for the fundamental question addressed within this topic: Is cognitive control to be understood as resulting from the interaction of multiple distinct control processes, or are the phenomena of cognitive control emergent?

Keywords: Attentional bias; Cognitive control; Executive functions; Memory maintenance and updating; Monitoring; Response inhibition; Task-switching.