The role of active memory in the development of cognitive control.

成年人的思维非常灵活，能够从复杂的环境中选择特定的信息流，然后重新配置自己以适应全新的任务。这些心理能力似乎是由复杂的大脑网络的协调作用支持的，尽管目前，这些网络的组织和功能还不是很清楚。了解这些能力的认知和大脑基础的一种方法是通过研究发育变化。年幼的孩子往往在思维上非常不灵活，当他们不再适合这样做时，他们仍然专注于视觉或听觉世界的特定特征。了解这种不灵活性的基础，以及在发展过程中发生的神经认知变化，这些变化赋予了大脑更大的灵活性，将为这些基本问题提供重要的启示。目前的研究重点是主动记忆在认知控制发展中的作用。主动记忆使我们能够将当前的目标放在脑海中，突出环境中的相关信息，并减弱干扰，并且可能是实现控制的大脑网络的重要专业化。通过使用聚合认知行为和神经成像方法，当前的项目将测试这些想法在理解学龄前儿童的不灵活性以及发生在儿童中期和成年早期的控制能力的发展变化方面的效用。

The adult human mind is remarkably flexible, readily able to select particular streams of information from a complex environment and then reconfigure itself for entirely new tasks. It appears that these mental abilities are supported by the coordinated action of complex brain networks, although at present, the organization and function of these networks is not well-understood. One means of gaining insight into the cognitive and brain bases of these abilities is through the study of developmental change. Young children are often strikingly inflexible in their thinking by remaining fixated on particular features of the visual or auditory world when it is no longer appropriate to do so. Understanding the basis of this inflexibility and the neurocognitive changes that occur in development that lend the mind greater flexibility would shed important light on these fundamental issues. The current research programme focuses on the role of active memory in the development of cognitive control. Active memory is what allows us to keep current goals in the forefront of our mind, highlight relevant information in the environment, and attenuate distractors, and may be an important specialization of brain networks that implement control. Through the use of converging cognitive-behavioural and neuroimaging methods, the current programme will test the utility of these ideas both for understanding inflexibility in preschool-aged children as well as developmental changes in control that occur between middle-childhood and early adulthood.