Neural and Psychological Mechanisms of Interference Control.

Abstract

Interference control is the ability to select relevant information while filtering out irrelevant distracting information. Theories of interference control differ regarding whether a single system of control acts upon multiple representations, or whether dissociable forms of control exist. Moreover, it is unclear whether control relies on the facilitation of relevant information, inhibition of irrelevant information, or both. Here, we combine cognitive psychology, functional neuromaging, and meta-analytic techniques to examine the neural and psychological mechanisms of interference control. We find common control-related activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex across perceptual, memorial, and response selection. However, control networks in more posterior regions of the brain differentiate by the kinds of representations that control acts upon. We suggest that the frontal eye fields and superior parietal lobule may be most closely linked to selective attention mechanisms that underlie perceptual selection, but that these regions may also be recruited to select upon competing memorial and response representations. Interference control processes acting upon competing memories preferentially recruit left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, which shows enhanced functional connectivity with the medial temporal lobe when selection demands are increased. Finally, response selection processes may engage the premotor cortex, and all forms of selection may be dissociable from inhibition processes that act just before motor execution. We demonstrate that at least in the perceptual domain, control processes act by a combination of facilitation of relevant information and inhibition of irrelevant information, and that inhibition can affect processing at least several seconds into the future. The role of inhibition in memory remains less clear. Our results suggest that common goal-related information stored in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex biases processing in dissociable posterior networks responsible for different kinds of information. Hence, both common and dissociable neural and psychological mechanisms underlie interference control.