Linguistic and Nonlinguistic Functions of Frontal Cortex

描述（由申请人提供）：前额叶皮层支持我们调节思想，行为和情绪的能力。它在整个生命周期中经历了重大变化，并受到许多精神和神经疾病的影响。因此，毫不奇怪，许多基础和转化神经科学研究的目的是阐明前额叶皮层的功能。在过去的十年里，这笔赠款支持了我们对左派的调查， 特别是腹外侧前额叶皮层（VLPFC）。由于历史的原因--可以追溯到150年前保罗·布罗卡（Paul Broca）关于该区域受损后言语障碍的开创性报告--许多研究人员认为左侧VLPFC在语言处理中起着特定的作用。相比之下，我们认为，VLPFC不发挥作用，特别是在语言领域，而是招聘的条件下，要求解决冲突之间的竞争，不兼容的代表性的刺激是高的。这些发现为VLPFC确定了一个角色，这个角色与前额叶皮层其他区域的角色有更多的共同点，而不是任何语言特定的解释，并且他们帮助建立了不同认知领域（如语言和工作记忆）之间共享的处理需求之间的联系。在项目的下一个五年期间，我们将以三种显著不同的方式改变我们的方法。具体而言，（1）我们的目标是研究 认知控制在传统上与额叶无关的领域，即事件理解，隐喻加工和学习的影响~（2）我们的目标是证明认知控制对认知的好处和成本~（3）我们的目标是开发分析工具， 测量与认知控制相关的新结构。我们相信，拟议中的研究将对该领域产生重大而持续的影响，因为我们将旧的（有偏见的竞争）和新的（认知控制的成本）思想扩展到更多的领域和更多的神经系统。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The prefrontal cortex supports our ability to regulate our thoughts, our behaviors, and our emotions. It undergoes major changes across the lifespan, and it is affected by numerous psychiatric and neurological conditions. Thus, it is no surprise that much of basic and translational neuroscience research is aimed at elucidating the functions of prefrontal cortex. For the past decade, this grant has supported our investigations of the left, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), in particular. For historical reasons-dating to Paul Broca's seminal report 150 years ago of speech disturbances following damage to this region-many researchers have theorized that the left VLPFC plays a specific role in language processing. In contrast, we have argued that VLPFC does not play a role specifically in the domain of language but rather is recruited under conditions in which demands to resolve conflict between competing, incompatible representations of a stimulus are high. These findings establish a role for the VLPFC that has much more in common with that proposed for other regions of prefrontal cortex than does any language-specific account, and they have helped to establish links between the processing demands that are shared across different cognitive domains (such as language and working memory). Over the next five-year period of the project, we will shift our approach in three significantly different ways. Specifically, (1) We aim to study the impact of cognitive control in domains not traditionally associated with the frontal lobes, namely event comprehension, metaphor processing, and learning~ (2) We aim to demonstrate the benefits and costs of cognitive control for cognition~ (3) We aim to develop analytic tools for measuring novel constructs related to cognitive control. We believe the proposed research stands to have a major and sustained impact on the field, as we extend both old (biased competition) and new (costs of cognitive control) ideas into a greater number of domains and into a greater number of neural systems.