The role of memory in driving and supporting the implementation of cognitive control

The overall goal of this dissertation was to investigate the interaction between memory processes and implementation of cognitive control, focusing on the bi-directional relationship between the two. Working memory can serve as a source of interference for the implementation of cognitive control and episodic memory can guide the successful implementation of cognitive control.

Chapter 2 investigated how cognitive control is implemented over working memory-guided attentional processes. While the contents of working memory can guide external attention to similar or matching items whether adaptive or not, cognitive control can act over this guidance in service of top-down goals, limiting its influence when maladaptive. While previous work had demonstrated that control can act over working memory, how cognitive control specifically acts over the attentional capture process driven by working memory remained unclear. Here I presented work from electroencephalography (EEG) in order to demonstrate that cognitive control acts over the post-orienting processing of visual stimuli, reactively reducing the need to marshal additional resources to limit the interference on attention exerted by the contents of working memory. This demonstrated how control acts over working memory-guided attention, relying on reactive implementation over the post-orientation processing of stimuli, not the attentional orienting processes itself, in order to reduce the influence of working memory contents on attention in service of top-down goals.

In Chapter 3, I further demonstrated that cognitive control can be implemented over complex, action-related representations in working memory (i.e. task-sets). While prior work had focused largely on the influence from simple representations in working memory, much of the contents of our internal thoughts are action-oriented. Further, previous work had characterized the influence of working memory action-representations on ongoing behavior as automatic. However, in this chapter I presented two sets of studies which demonstrated that cognitive control can be proactively implemented on the creation of action representations in working memory, as well as reactively implemented over their interference in ongoing behavior, according to current goals and task demands. This extends the role of cognitive control to action representations in working memory, expanding our knowledge of how cognitive control acts over complex internal thoughts.

Finally, in Chapter 4, I demonstrated how memory processes not only serve as sources of interference for the implementation of cognitive control, but can also guide the successful implementation of cognitive control. Previous work had proposed that successful implementation of cognitive control was driven through episodic learning processes. Here I first present a set of behavioral studies demonstrating for the first time that a control state can be mnemonically associated with a specific stimulus in episodic-supported event-files in memory given the one-shot pairing of a stimulus and control state. Further, this episodic memory-supported event-file and associated control state can then be retrieved later, triggered by the reappearance of a stimulus, in order to successfully implement cognitive control. Further, using pupillometry as a measure of attention, I presented work showing that the encoding of these stimulus-control associations requires active, engaged attention, but their retrieval is automatic once encoded. This work demonstrates the role of memory processes in supporting the successful implementation of cognitive control.