Cognitive Neuroscience
Executive functions
Dongil Chung, PhD
Department of Biomedical Engineering
UNIST
Executive function
• Supervisory or regulatory roles
• Rules & Control
• e.g., mentally simulate an opponent’s strategies in a complex game
• e.g., guide the flow of sensory information or to initiate a motor action
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A taxonomy of executive function
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Comparative anatomy of the prefrontal
cortex
• Prefrontal cortex: a key contributor to executive function
• Size matters? Early data suggested this
(PFC size), but recent data rejected it
No PFC indicated,
because no clear homologies
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<- First investigated in (Gerussi et al., 2023)
Major brain regions that support
executive control
• Prefrontal cortex: bilateral prefrontal damage caused deficits: failure to
recognize known objects, inability to use past experience to guide
behavior, deficits in initiative, loss of affective responses, and lack of
coherent behavior
• Modern: posterior parietal, anterior cingulate, and basal ganglia
* Basal ganglia: particularly important in the
context of decision making
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Connectivity of the prefrontal cortex
• Prefrontal size: 35% of the
human brain
• Lateral surface: lateral
prefrontal cortex;
dorsolateral- ventrolateral-
• Ventral surface: orbitofrontal
cortex; ventromedial-
• Medial surface: dorsomedial-
• Frontopolar cortex
• ~ project to and receive input
from secondary sensory
cortices, motor preparatory
structures, and parietal cortex
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Consequences of damage to the
prefrontal cortex (PFC)
• Perceptual, language, and motor abilities are usually unimpaired,
and the ability to recall events or facts from memory is typically
intact
• Damage to lateral PFC: dysexecutive syndrome; difficulty
managing daily lives, fail to plan for the future, rarely initiate new
projects or set long-term goals, leave tasks uncompleted, limited
span of attention
• Damage to ventral/medial PFC: disinhibition syndrome; intact
working memory, exhibit constant movement, euphoric or manic
with abnormal sense of humor, laugh at inappropriate times, fail to
respond to normal social cues
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e.g., Case of Phinease Gage
• Impaired ventral frontal lobe
• Traditional narrative: dramatic effects on his personality;
responsible -> reckless and impulsive
• Recent narrative: hardly itinerant and unproductive -> traveled
independently to South America and remained employed for years
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Establishing and modifying behavioral
rules
• PFC = switch operator
• Set up rules for the patterns of information flow
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Initiating rules
• Damage to the lateral PFC: impaired ability to initiate motor
movements, complex actions, and mental plans
• Population of neurons carry information about different rules
(regardless of the sample or the cue)
An example neuron whose firing rate increases
on the match-to-sample trials
Cue indicates the rule to follow
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Initiating rules (and creating new rules)
Not only PFC, but also basal ganglia involved in
• PFC neurons: category learning (a) motor & (b-c) non-motor controls
tasks
• Basal ganglia: creation of rules that
map a specific stimulus to a specific
response; revealed from both fMRI
and lesion studies
• Parietal cortex: rule creation;
executive function closely tied to the
generation of actions
• Lateral intraparietal area (LIP; in
primates): expected value of possible
actions, create and maintain the set
of possible actions
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Inhibiting rules
• Four primary forms of inhibition
• Halting behaviors
• Preventing irrelevant information from interfering with other
processing
• Restraining actions that are inapproriate in a given context
• Removing irrelevant information from working memory
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Inhibiting rules (e.g., oddball task)
• Standard response + Target stimulus (5-10%)
• ERP: P300 component; response to the target oddball
• Intracranial corticogram: parietal, medial prefrontal, lateral PFC, and hippocampus
• fMRI: dlPFC, parietal cortex
• Similar to “go/no-go task”: Most stimuli (“go”) + infrequent target stimuli (“no-go”;
inhibit responding)
Distractor; no action change oddball
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Inhibiting rules (e.g., stop-signal task)
• Inhibit responding to the “stop” signal
• Patients with damage to the posterior ventrolateral frontal
cortex in the right hemisphere have difficulty inhibiting their
reponses to the stop signal
• Also in …
• Patients with impulse control disorders: attention deifict hyperactivity
disorder (ADHD)
• Deficits in basal ganglia (associated with Parkinson’s disease)
• Motor inhibition relies on: lPFC + circuits between lPFC and
basal ganglia
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Inhibiting socially inappropriate
behaviors
• Damage to ventral PFC: generalized failure to match their
behavior to typical rules for social interactions
• e.g., argumentative, profane, aggressive, violent, unable to control
sexual impulses
• Most severe form of frontal disinhibition syndrome: acquired
sociopathy (antisocial behavior that arises because of trauma or
disease)
• Blunted emotional affect, extreme emotional outburst, poor decisions
in social situation, difficulty interacting with others
• Intact ability to distinguish good actions from bad (different from
‘congenital’ – present from birth – sociopath: goal-directed and rarely
remorseful)
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