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CognitiveCTRL, p. 379

People multitask all the time, listening to music while exercising, talking with friends while
walking, or planning dinner while driving. So when can we multitask well enough and when
can we not? It’s generally difficult to do two things at once, but some tasks are easier to
combine than others. While writing a research paper, it would be difficult to carry out a
conversation with someone, a little less difficult to watch a TV show at the same time, and
easier to listen to music in the background. Multitasking is simpler when at least one of the
tasks does not require substantial cognitive effort.
Cognitive control is “the ability to orchestrate thought and action in accordance with internal
goals” (Miller & Cohen, 2001, p. 167; also discussed in Diamond, 2013). Most activities
involve some control of behavior. Cognitive control, also known as executive control, makes
our activities purposeful. It allows us to plan, decide, select behaviors, and coordinate more
than one action at a time. Sometimes, we apply cognitive control in anticipation of a
challenge, which is known as proactive control (“I know there will be candy at the checkout
counter, so I have to be strong”). Other times we apply cognitive control only in reaction to a
challenge, which is known as reactive control (“Ack! Candy! Must. Resist”). These distinct
mechanisms of cognitive control recruit different brain regions and each contribute to
differences in people’s ability to guide their own behavior (Braver, 2012; Braver et al., 2009).

Cognitive control is the ability to orchestrate thought and action, like a conductor leading
musicians.
Because the mind has limited capacity, cognitive control requires attention. A mental
resource refers to limitations in how much information the mind can process at any given
time. For example, Chapter 4 showed how we can attend to only a handful of objects in the
external environment. On top of this, internal attention refers to limitations in how much
information can be prioritized within the mind. Try this: Remember the following cities, look
away (or close your eyes), and then plot a route through all the cities in alphabetical order:
San Francisco, Beijing, London, Paris, Nairobi, Sydney. This task is difficult, consuming
much of your limited mental resources, requiring attention to your thoughts rather than to the
external world. Cognitive control allows you to prioritize and negotiate all the competing
demands from your surrounding environment and from within your mind.
Studying cognitive control can help optimize human performance and understand when that
performance breaks down (e.g., Sweller, 1988; Sweller et al., 1998). First we consider when
and why performance suffers when people try to do more than one thing at a time.
Task Load, Overlap, and Interference
Two primary factors dictate whether effective multitasking is possible. The first is cognitive
load, which describes a task’s difficulty. If the load is low, the task may be easy to perform
simultaneously with another when the combined tasks fit within one’s mental capacity. The
cognitive demands of walking are relatively low, for example, so you can typically do other
low-load tasks while walking, such as listen to a podcast or talk with a friend. But attempting
a higher-load task such as texting while walking can be hazardous. Between 2004 and 2010,
the number of emergency room visits for pedestrian injuries related to cell phone use tripled
 (Nasar & Troyer, 2013). More demanding tasks, such as solving a problem set or writing a
paper, are best performed one at a time.
The second factor that affects the ability to multitask is cognitive overlap, or how much the
demands of simultaneous tasks compete for the same mental resources. At one extreme,
both texting and driving require you to look. There’s a great deal of overlap, so these tasks
impede each other, sometimes fatally. In 2015, U.S. highway fatalities increased by the
largest annual percentage in 50 years (New York Times, 2016), most of them attributable to
the increase in phone app usage while driving. By contrast, listening to music and driving
overlap less. One is auditory, while the other is primarily visual and motor. The brain has
separate areas devoted to seeing and to listening, and the two activities compete less for
common processing. So audio entertainment has long been considered safe enough to be a
standard feature in all vehicles (as long as you don’t take your eyes off the road while trying
to operate it).
Dual-task experiments require participants to do two tasks at the same time. Cognitive
interference occurs when load is high or when two tasks overlap, and performance suffers
as a result. With a lower load or less overlap, less cognitive interference will occur, allowing
for better multitasking. By having participants try many different pairings of tasks, as
illustrated in the dual-task interference Discovery Lab, researchers can measure which tasks
interfere with each other and to what extent.

DISCOVERY LAB
Dual-Task Interference Encoding Task
It’s hard to socialize while everyone is on their own phone.
Distracted driving increases the risk of crashes or near-crashes, especially for novice drivers
(Klauer et al., 2014). Compared with listening to music or talking with a passenger in the car,
why would talking on a cell phone impede driving? First, the load of talking is higher than
passively listening to music. You have to comprehend what the other person is saying while
also formulating your own responses. Second, engaging with someone on the phone, who is

oblivious to your driving conditions (as opposed to an adult passenger who may adjust their
conversation when traffic gets busy), overlaps and interferes more with the demands of
driving. Dual-task studies in driving simulators have led researchers to conclude that having
cell phone conversations while driving may be as dangerous as driving drunk (Redelmeier &
Tibshirani, 1997; Strayer & Johnston, 2001), while texting is even more dangerous (Fitch et
al., 2013).

Automatic and Controlled Processes

Performing a task that requires minimal cognitive effort is called an automatic process. In
contrast, performing a task that requires more cognitive involvement is called a controlled
process (Schneider & Shiffrin, 1977; Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977). The cognitive load is much
higher for controlled tasks, such as talking on a cell phone, than for automatic tasks, such as
listening to a radio. Managing multiple controlled tasks, or one controlled and one automatic,
is more difficult than managing multiple automatic tasks. Hence, talking on a cell phone
impairs driving more than listening to music.
Controlled activities typically recruit the brain area prefrontal cortex, which implements
cognitive control, or what Norman and Shallice (1980) have called supervisory attentional
control. The prefrontal cortex serves as a command center to coordinate the
tasks. However, even these findings have been questioned by subsequent studies and
analyses (Sala & Gobet, 2020). Regardless, music training should be its own reward.
Follow your experience. If listening to favored music puts you in a good mood and helps you
focus in distracting study settings, then it’s probably OK. However, if you have trouble
studying effectively while listening to music, stick to a quieter atmosphere. If you don’t listen
to music while studying, there is no reason to pick up the habit.

brain’s activities. Thus, damage to prefrontal cortex, such as from a stroke, impairs cognitive
control. Consider the act of brushing your teeth. This simple task is automatic, but a little
cognitive control is needed to initiate it—which is why you may skip it when tired, and why
you don’t do it at inappropriate times. If shown a toothbrush, patients with prefrontal cortex
damage may start brushing their teeth even in the middle of a clinical interview, unable to
suppress the habitual urge. Such patients lack cognitive control because the “command
center” is dysfunctional (Lhermitte, 1983).
Another example of how prefrontal cortex damage can disrupt cognitive control is with
delayed-alternation tasks, in which a reward predictably alternates between the two options.
For example, a participant would be rewarded for pressing button A, then button B, then
button A, and so forth. Typical individuals can pick up on this rule. However, patients with
prefrontal damage will keep picking the option that was previously rewarded, no matter the
pattern. These perseveration errors—persistent responses that fail to adapt to changing
rules or circumstances—are typical of individuals with prefrontal damage.
Inhibition
When you drive a vehicle or ride a bike, the ability to stop or slow down is essential. Imagine
not having brakes. Mental tasks also need brakes—when speaking up in class, it’s best to
avoid any profanity, even if what you’re saying is f^#%ing cool. An essential function of
cognitive control is inhibition, the ability to suppress

information, thoughts, or actions that may interfere with ongoing behavior—to tap a brake on
mental operations (Aron et al., 2004, 2014).
Inhibition reduces distraction and helps people choose how to act. When driving, it’s best to
ignore texts, for example. While studying for a test, you need to focus on the course material
and inhibit distracting worries or thoughts. For police officers, the stakes are high in quickly
deciding whether to use force or inhibit the impulse to do so.
Psychologists have developed several tests to measure inhibition in the laboratory,
quantifying how individuals vary greatly in their ability to inhibit. The stop-signal task
(FIGURE 5.1) is a classic measure of inhibition (Logan & Cowan, 1984; Logan et al., 1984),
in which individuals respond as quickly as possible to a green circle target (“Go trial” in
Figure 5.1). Individuals typically respond to this cue within a half-second. On a small
proportion of trials, a red circle stop signal appears soon after the target stimulus:
participants must stop (withhold) their response to the target on such trials. Most typical
individuals are able to inhibit themselves when the stop signal appears early in the trial
(“Early-stop trial” in Figure 5.1). However, when the stop signal appears later into the trial,
individuals find it more difficult to stop. (“Late-stop trial” in Figure 5.1). The later the stop
signal, the harder it is to inhibit the “go” response. People with good inhibition can respond to
a late stop signal better than people with poor inhibition. F I G U R E 5 . 1 The stop-signal
task Participants respond to the green circle as quickly as possible, except when the stop
signal appears. It’s hard to stop when the stop signal appears later in the trial, after people
have committed to responding to the target. View a larger version of this figure. (After S. M.
Helfinstein and R. A. Poldrack. 2012. Nat Neurosci 15: 803–805.)
It is harder to inhibit when rushed, as in the stop-signal task, or when the need to inhibit
occurs infrequently. The continuous performance task, introduced in Chapter 4, also requires
inhibition —observers must respond differently or withhold their response to an
unpredictable and infrequent target (Rosenberg et al., 2013; Rosvold et al., 1956). The
continuous performance task reveals decrements in sustained attention, or vigilance
(Barkley, 1997), the ability to maintain focus on a task. Lapses in sustained attention

can result in errors on the job or poor grades in school. For truck drivers, air traffic
controllers, and soldiers in the field, vigilance can be a matter of life or death.

Real-world examples of Stroop interference can demonstrate bias. Consider a laboratory

task in which participants monitored images on a computer screen and were asked to
simulate firing at a suspect holding a gun, and to withhold firing at suspects holding a bottle.
The task, which requires cognitive control and selective inhibition, tested for unconscious
bias by varying the race of the suspects. Participants were more likely to shoot at
bottle-holding (i.e., innocent) suspects who were Black than at innocent suspects who were
White (Correll et al., 2002). The relation to Stroop interference is that automatic processing
may sometimes be linked to unconscious biases that impair cognitive control. Reassuringly,
professional police officers did not show this shooting bias in the lab (Correll et al., 2007),
although incidents of bias in the real world have fueled activism such as the Black Lives
Matter movement.
Another way to test for response conflict is the Simon task, also known as the spatial
interference task (Simon & Rudell, 1967; Simon & Wolf, 1963), in which a spatial
incompatibility between the target location and the responding hand slows down response
time. FIGURE 5.2 illustrates an example. Participants fixate their eyes on the middle of the
screen, while a target can appear to the right or

automatic. Inhibitory processes allow you to suppress the word meanings, so that you focus
on naming the color. In the bottom of the figure, the conflicting words cause you to slow
down and make more mistakes. The Stroop task shows the importance of cognitive control,
which enables you to inhibit the automatic word meaning to focus on the task of naming the
word color.

left of where they’re looking. Two conditions are depicted in Figure 5.2. In the compatible
condition, the target is blue. When the blue target appears on the left, you press left; when it
appears on the right, you press right. In the incompatible condition, the target is green and
you make the opposite responses: when the green target appears on the left, you press
right, and when the green target appears on the right, you press left. Individuals find it harder
to complete the task in the incompatible condition, which requires more cognitive control.

The flanker task (SEE FOR YOURSELF 5.2) reveals two types of interference: perceptual
and response interference (Eriksen & Eriksen, 1974; Hillman et al., 2008). For a
demonstration of response interference, in the examples below quickly categorize the middle
word as furniture or a metal:
(A) LAMP DESK LAMP (B) GOLD DESK GOLD
This task is much easier in example A, in which the two words on either side belong in the
same category, than in example B, in which the two words on either side belong in a different
category. Perceptual interference is similar in both cases, but the categorical similarity for
“LAMP DESK LAMP” speeds up the judgment, just as the dissimilarity for “GOLD DESK
GOLD” slows it down. Similar to what happens in the Stroop task, the flanker words are
automatically processed, and need to be inhibited when they are incompatible (Shaffer &
LaBerge, 1979).

To summarize, a wide variety of tasks can test inhibition to resolve interference. The tasks all
involve perceptual and response interference, but to different degrees. Some tasks test
response inhibition more purely, such as the stop-signal task. Some tasks are more
perceptual: the Stroop task involves perceptual conflict between the word meaning and its
color, while the Simon task involves interference between the target location and the natural
inclination to respond right to things on the right and left to things on the left. Finally, the
flanker task allows researchers to separately test both perceptual and response interference.