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Updated: Oct 6, 2025
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A Fully Automated Rodent Conditioning Protocol for Sensorimotor Integration and Cognitive Control Experiments
Published on: April 15, 2014
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The many faces of learning-guided cognitive control.
1Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis.
Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition
|January 13, 2022
Summary
People adapt cognitive control by learning environmental regularities, either incrementally or through stimulus associations. This control learning can sometimes conflict with memory processes.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Human Behavior
Background:
- Adaptive control is crucial for goal-directed behavior.
- Understanding how individuals learn to adjust control dynamically is a key research question.
Purpose of the Study:
- To explore how people learn to adapt cognitive control in a context-sensitive manner.
- To investigate the role of environmental regularities in guiding control engagement.
Main Methods:
- The special issue presents studies examining learning-control interactions.
- Methods likely involve behavioral experiments and computational modeling.
Main Results:
- Control adaptation occurs through learning environmental regularities.
- Learning can be incremental (e.g., trial difficulty) or associative (stimulus-control mapping).
- Adaptive control and learning/memory processes can sometimes interfere.
Conclusions:
- Learning environmental regularities is fundamental to adaptive control.
- Both incremental and associative learning mechanisms contribute to context-sensitive control.
- The interplay between learning and control is complex and context-dependent.
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