Neuroscience Of Rule-Guided Behavior

Description: Neuroscience of Rule-Guided Behavior brings together, for the first time, the experiments and theories that have created the new science of rules. Rules are central to human behavior, but until now the field of neuroscience lacked a synthetic approach to understanding them. How are rules learned, retrieved from memory, maintained in consciousness and implemented? How are they used to solve problems and select among actions and activities? How are the various levels of rules represented in the brain, ranging from simple conditional ones if a traffic light turns red, then stop to rules and strategies of such sophistication that they defy description? And how do brain regions interact to produce rule-guided behaviour? These are among the most fundamental questions facing neuroscience, but until recently there was relatively little progress in answering them. It was difficult to probe brain mechanisms in humans, and expert opinion held that animals lacked the capacity for such high-level behaviour.However, rapid progress in neuroimaging technology has allowed investigators to explore brain mechanisms in humans, while increasingly sophisticated behavioral methods have revealed that animals can and do use high-level rules to control their behavior. The resulting explosion of information has led to a new science of rules, but it has also produced a plethora of overlapping ideas and terminology and a field sorely in need of synthesis. In this book, Silvia Bunge and Jonathan Wallis bring together the worlds leading cognitive and systems neuroscientists to explain the most recent research on rule-guided behavior. Their work covers a wide range of disciplines and methods, including neuropsychology, functional magnetic resonance imaging, neurophysiology, electroencephalography, neuropharmacology, near-infrared spectroscopy, and transcranial magnetic stimulation. This unprecedented synthesis is a must-read for anyone interested in how complex behaviour is controlled and organized by the brain. Table of Contents: Introduction; PART I: RULE REPRESENTATION; 1. Selection between Competing Responses based on Conditional Rules; 2. Single Neuron Activity Underlying Behavior-Guiding Rules; 3. Neural Representations Used to Specify Action a Silvia A Bunge and Michael J. Souza; 4. Maintenance and Implementation of Task Rules; 5. The Neurophysiology of Abstract Response Strategies; 6. Abstraction of Mental Representations: Theoretical Considerations and Neuroscientific Evidence; PART II: RULE IMPLEMENTATION; 7. Ventrolateral and Medial Frontal Contributions to Decision-Making and Action Selection; 8. Differential Involvement of the Prefrontal, Premotor, and Primary Motor Cortices in Rule-Based Motor Behavior; 9. The Role of the Posterior Frontolateral Cortex in Task-Related Control; 10. Time Course of Executive Processes: Data from the Event-Related Optical Signal; PART III: TASK-SWITCHING; 11. Task-Switching in Human and Non-Human Primates: Understanding Rule Encoding and Control from Behavior to Single Neurons; 12. Neural Mechanisms of Cognitive Control in Task-Switching: Rules, Representations, and Preparation; 13. Dopaminergic and Serotonergic Modulation of Two Distinct Forms of Flexible Cognitive Control: Attentional Set-Shifting and Reversal Learning; 14. Dopaminergic Modulation of Flexible Cognitive Control: The Role of the Striatum; PART IV: BUILDING BLOCKS OF RULE REPRESENTATION; 15. Binding and Organization in the Medical Temporal Lobe; 16. Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex and Controlling Memory to Inform Action; 17. Exploring the Roles of the Frontal, Temporal, and Parietal Lobes in Visual Categorization; 18. Rules through Recursion: How Interactions Between the Frontal Cortex and Basal Ganglia may Build Abstract Rules from Concrete, Simple Ones; 19. The Development of Rule Use in Childhood