Tracking the neural signature of cognitive control with model-based lesion-mapping
 
Jan Gläscher 
University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf
 
Cognitive control is one of the hallmarks of higher-order cognitive functions in humans and is 
commonly usually associated with prefrontal brain regions. Damage to these regions can lead to 
impairments in fairly high-level abilities such as action planning, deterioration of motor execution 
and monitoring of action plans, while keeping more basic perceptual, motor, memory, and language 
functions intact. There exist a number of widely used neuropsychological tests that target specific 
aspects of cognitive control. 
In this talk I will present data from 3 studies that aim at characterizing diminished cognitive control in 
healthy elderly participants as well as in neurological patients with circumscribed brain lesion. After 
surveying the brain structures associated with various cognitive control tasks, I will present recent 
efforts to characterize the impaired cognitive function in more detail using computational modeling 
in combination with voxel-based lesion mapping. This novel approach employs meaningful 
parameters of a computational model and treats them as a cognitive (endo)phenotype, which readily 
renders itself to brain mapping technique. Model-based lesion mapping therefore parallels recent 
efforts in the emerging field of computational psychiatry, which also aims at characterizing 
psychiatric patients in terms of their computational signature on various cognitive tasks.