Trends in Cognitive Sciences
ReviewThe multiple-demand (MD) system of the primate brain: mental programs for intelligent behaviour
Section snippets
Multiple-demand activity in the human brain
Over the past 20 years, functional neuroimaging has identified many individual associations between specific cognitive functions and specific regions of the human cerebral cortex. In parallel, there has been a more unexpected discovery – a common pattern of activity that is a salient part of the brain's response to many different kinds of cognitive challenge. Illustrated in Figure 1a, this multiple-demand (MD) pattern 1, 2 extends over a specific set of regions in prefrontal and parietal
Neurophysiology of mental programs
Each step of a mental program defines a new cognitive epoch, with different operations, goals, and task-relevant information. In everyday behaviour, such epochs follow in rapid succession, requiring frequent changes of processing context. Both single unit and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data show features of MD activity well matched to the construction of focused cognitive epochs, and rapid transition from one to the next.
An example is shown in Figure 2 24, 25, 26, 27. In these
MD activity in new task assembly
As a new task is learned, its components must be identified, separated and assembled. The ability to learn and use the multiple rules of novel, complex behaviour is strongly correlated with fluid intelligence 51, 52. In extreme cases, failure is manifest in ‘goal neglect’ [51]; although the subject might correctly describe the different task components, one component is lost in actual behaviour. Similar mismatch between knowledge and behaviour has long been described in frontal lobe patients 20
Conclusions and open questions
The importance of frontal lobe processes in complex, sequential activity has long been recognized 20, 21. Symbolic artificial intelligence has shown how complex, goal-directed behaviour is achieved through sequential mental programming, or dividing complex problems into component sub-problems. With the ascendancy of parallel, neural network models, interest in sequential mental programming has been somewhat in abeyance. Much work has addressed isolated acts of cognitive control, such as
Acknowledgements
This work was funded by Medical Research Council (UK) intramural program U.1055.01.001.00001.01. Russell Thompson provided expert assistance with figures, in particular data preparation for Figure 3.
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