Cognitive control, emotional value, and the lateral prefrontal cortex

Cognitive control refers to the intentional selection of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors based on current task demands and social context, and the concomitant suppression of inappropriate habitual actions (Miller and Cohen, 2001). Common situations that require cognitive control include: studying for an exam while resisting the impulse to check Facebook; having fruit instead of dessert when on a diet; and being patient with one's kids instead of yelling at them for spilling juice on the carpet. Historically, there has been preferential interest in how cognitive control operates. An influential model suggests that the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) represents rules or instructions in working memory and that this information adaptively guides perceptual and motor processing in posterior brain regions, thus resulting in the selection of appropriate behaviors, and the suppression of maladaptive habitual actions (Miller and Cohen, 2001; Bunge, 2004). Surprisingly, there has been less focus on why individuals choose to engage cognitive control in the first place (Dixon and Christoff, 2012; Botvinick and Braver, 2015). In this article, I outline a value-based framework of cognitive control which suggests that: (1) individuals choose to engage cognitive control when they expect that it will produce an emotionally valued outcome (i.e., a reward or the avoidance of punishment); (2) the LPFC is a critical neural substrate involved in representing the value of engaging cognitive control; and (3) the LPFC is organized along a rostro-caudal axis, with different sub-regions contributing to different elements of the decision to employ cognitive control.