One of the most challenging problems facing cognitive psychology and                  cognitive neuroscience is to explain how mental processes are voluntarily                  controlled, allowing the computational resources of the brain to be selected                  flexibly and deployed to achieve changing goals. The eighteenth of the celebrated                  international symposia on Attention and Performance focused on this problem, seeking                  to banish or at least deconstruct the "homunculus": that conveniently intelligent                  but opaque agent still lurking within many theories, under the guise of a central                  executive or supervisory attentional system assumed to direct processes that are not                  "automatic."The thirty-two contributions discuss evidence from psychological                  experiments with healthy and brain-damaged subjects, functional imaging,                  electrophysiology, and computational modeling. Four sections focus on specific forms                  of control: of visual attention, of perception-action coupling, of task-switching                  and dual-task performance, and of multistep tasks. The other three sections extend                  the interdisciplinary approach, with chapters on the neural substrate of control,                  studies of control disorders, and computational simulations. The progress achieved                  in fractionating, localizing, and modeling control functions, and in understanding                  the interaction between stimulus-driven and voluntary control, takes research on                  control in the mind/brain to a new level of sophistication.

Control of Cognitive Processes: Attention and Performance XVIII PDF

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