IntroductionDue to the actual limitation of training conditions, the freestyle skiing aerials winter training term is short. Training tasks such as adaptability training and developing new skills are needed in summer training. When facing different training environments, freestyle skiing aerial athletes’ executive control over their abilities could be affected, which can affect their performance. Therefore, we want to research the effect of training conditions on executive control in freestyle skiing aerials athletes and its neural mechanism.Materials and (...) methodsThirty-two freestyle skiing aerials athletes were recruited. We evaluated their executive control and used fNIRS to measure oxygenated hemoglobin concentration changes in the prefrontal cortex during a rapid event-related design go/nogo task with different training condition-activated materials.ResultsAthletes’ behavior control in the summer condition has a lower accuracy than it is in the control condition. Athletes’ behavior control in the summer and winter training conditions had a longer reaction time than that in the control condition. The activation of the bilateral dlPFC and orbitofrontal cortex had a significant main effect across training conditions when freestyle skiing aerial athletes completed executive control tasks. The activation of athletes’ bilateral vlPFC and left dlPFC had an interaction between training conditions and behavioral control.ConclusionDifferent training conditions can lead to freestyle skiing aerial athletes executive control ability to drop, players in different training conditions show less activation on both sides of the vlPFC and orbitofrontal. The bilateral vlPFC and left dlPFC have an integrated effect on behavior inhibition across training conditions. (shrink)

On the Causal Theory of Action (CTA), internal proper parts of an agent such as desires and intentions are causally responsible for actions. CTA has increasingly come under attack for its alleged failure to account for agency. A recent version of this criticism due to François Schroeter proposes that CTA cannot provide an adequate account of either the executive control or the autonomous control involved in full-fledged agency. Schroeter offers as an alternative a revised understanding of the (...) proper role of consciousness in agency. In this paper we criticize Schroeter’s analysis of the type of consciousness involved in executive control and examine the way in which the conscious self allegedly intervenes in action. We argue that Schroeter’s proposal should not be preferred over recent versions of CTA. (shrink)

Like the Theory of Event Coding (TEC), theories of executive functions depict cognition as a flexible and goal-directed system rather than a reflex-like one. Research on task-switching, a dominant paradigm in executive control, has revealed complex and some apparently counterintuitive results. Many of these are readily explained by assuming, like TEC, that cognitive control is based on selecting information from commensurate representations of stimuli and actions.

There is a wide variety of cases of alienation, including (a) when an agent is alienated from her own motivational states and (b) deviant causal cases when an agent's motivational states cause her intended actions but via a deviant causal pathway. Reflecting on the variety of kinds of alienation reveals that action explanation still needs to account for the positive role that agents play in non-alienated actions in general. To fill this gap, this paper identifies a sui generis but crucial (...) notion of control, what I call “synchronic executive control,” where agents act on their reasons, which must be distinguished from (a) endorsing one's reasons as reasonable or as the reasons for action (from the autonomy literature), and (b) other, diachronic notions of executive control such as competence, skills-based control, planning-based control, and counterfactual control generally (from especially the deviant causation literature). The presence of such executive control is crucial for explaining the role of agents in non-alienated actions, and its absence explains the lack of agency in alienation cases. The result is the identification of a relationship agents have with their reasons which unifies the variety of non-alienated actions in a novel way. (shrink)

Depression has been linked with impaired executive control and specific impairments in inhibition of negative material. To date, only a few studies have examined the relationship between depressive symptoms and executive functions in response to emotional information. Using a new paradigm, the Affective Shift Task (AST), the present study examined whether depressive symptoms in general, and rumination specifically, are related to impairments in inhibition and set shifting in response to emotional and non-emotional material. The main finding was (...) that depressive symptoms in general were not related to inhibition. Set-shifting impairments were only observed in moderate to severely depressed individuals. Interestingly, rumination was related to inhibition impairments, specifically when processing negative information, as well as impaired set shifting as reflected in a larger shift cost. These results are discussed in relation to cognitive views on vulnerability for depression. (shrink)

Comparing cognitive functions between humans and nonhuman primates is helpful for understanding human tool use. We comment on the latest insights from comparative research on executive control functions. Based on our own work, we discuss how even a mental function in which non-human primates outperform humans might have played a key role in the development of tool use.

We predicted that short-term training of executive control would improve both cognitive control itself and general fluid intelligence. We randomly assigned 120 high school students to the experimental and control groups. The former underwent a 14-day training of four executive functions: interference resolution, response inhibition, task switching, and goal monitoring. The latter did not train anything. The training significantly improved cognitive control and IQ. The control group also improved their IQ scores but gained (...) less than the experimental one. However, the amount of IQ scores enhancement did not correlate with the majority of indices of the training effectiveness, thus justifying the supposition that such enhancement resulted from the general effect of participation in the training rather than from the improvement of executive functions underlying Gf. (shrink)

The Findlay & Walker model of saccade generation does not appear to account fully for saccadic performance deficits observed in schizophrenia patients. It would be enhanced by inclusion of a frontally mediated, central executive function system. A review of schizophrenia patients' antisaccade task deficits provides an example of the role of higher cortical functioning in saccade generation.

Dubreuil (Biol Phil 25:53–73, 2010b , this journal) argues that modern-like cognitive abilities for inhibitory control and goal maintenance most likely evolved in Homo heidelbergensis , much before the evolution of oft-cited modern traits, such as symbolism and art. Dubreuil’s argument proceeds in two steps. First, he identifies two behavioral traits that are supposed to be indicative of the presence of a capacity for inhibition and goal maintenance: cooperative feeding and cooperative breeding. Next, he tries to show that these (...) behavioral traits most likely emerged in Homo heidelbergensis . In this paper, I show that neither of these steps are warranted in light of current scientific evidence, and thus, that the evolutionary background of human executive functions, such as inhibition and goal maintenance, remains obscure. Nonetheless, I suggest that cooperative breeding might mark a crucial step in the evolution of our species: its early emergence in Homo erectus might have favored a social intelligence that was required to get modernity really off the ground in Homo sapiens. (shrink)

In the present study the impact of need for cognitive closure manipulations via time pressure and explicit closure goal activation on executive control was investigated. Although there is some evidence that NFC, measured as an individual variable, is related to better performing in attentional tasks involving executive control, these results have never been validated across different manipulations of NFC. Thus, in the present study we induced NFC via internal and external time pressure and tested the impact (...) of these manipulations on the performance in tasks that measure executive control, i.e., the Stroop and switching tasks. The results revealed that induced high NFC, indeed boosted performance in executive control tasks. Moreover, there was no difference in the effect of both NFC manipulations on task performance. The implications regarding the role of executive control and specific NFC manipulations in social cognition are discussed. (shrink)

The target article's evolutionary approach provides an excellent framework for understanding when and why people retaliate or forgive. We argue that recent findings on the basic processes in forgiveness can further refine the authors' proposed model. Specifically, the lack of executive control may restrict the explanatory power of relationship value and exploitation risk.