Feb 05, 2025; Colloquium
Bühler TalksT. Goschke: Volition and cognitive control: Where do we stand – where should we go?
Professur für Allgemeine Psychologie, TUD
Humans exhibit remarkable cognitive control capacities, including the ability to adapt behavior flexibly to changing contexts and to override impulsive or habitual responses in favor of long-term goals. Conversely, impairments of these control capacities have been related to a wide range of harmful behaviors and mental disorders. In the past decades, impressive progress has been made in elucidating the underlying computational and neural mechanisms. Once popular, yet questionable concepts of control as a limited resource or simple dichotomies between an “impulsive” and a “reflective” system have been replaced by models of how volitional control emerges from distributed brain networks and how these networks are flexibly reconfigured to adapt to changing goals. Based on research we conducted over the past 12 years in the CRC 940, I will discuss three central, yet unresolved questions and sketch perspectives for future research. First, how can one increase the ecological validity of cognitive control research and test neurocognitive process models of self-control by assessing decision-making and behavior in real-life conflict situations? Second, how does cognitive control interact with motivational processes (e.g., is control always experienced as costly or can it also be intrinsically rewarding)? Third, how do goal-directed agents in changing and uncertain environments cope with antagonistic adaptive challenges (“control dilemmas”) that require a context-sensitive regulation of complementary control modes (e.g., cognitive stability vs. flexibility; exploitation vs. exploration). Uncovering the mechanisms underlying such “meta-control” processes constitutes a major challenge for the next wave of cognitive control research, that will require both novel experimental paradigms as well as computational modeling approaches.