A contexual view on cognitive control

Rapidly and flexibly adapting to conflicting situations is crucial for almost all of our daily activity. When we encounter conflict, we need to exert cognitive control to overcome it. Within the scientific community, cognitive control is typically approached from a very intrapersonal, artificial stance and studied in healthy, adult populations. However, when we encounter conflict and have to devote control to overcome it, we do this in a complex context. The possibility that the type of cognitive control we exert, the underlying mechanisms and neural activation patterns can differ based on contextual factors, is slowly gaining support. Within this project, we will study several contextual factors that play a role in cognitive control exertion. Specifically, we will focus on task-related factors (e.g., the proportion of conflict in the environment), subjective factors (e.g., a metacognitive feeling of task difficulty), social factors (e.g., the presence of others), developmental factors (e.g., our developmental stage in life) and clinical factors (e.g., a diagnosis of insomnia). Together, this project aims to develop a new contextual view on cognitive control. To reach this goal, we integrate behavioural and psychophysiological methods (fMRI, EEG, pupillometry).