About this Research Topic
As a high-level system coordinating thoughts and actions under uncertainty, cognitive control is heavily engaged in decision-making to achieve flexible reactions to the changes of environments. Decision-making in real-life can be understood as a competition between rationality and emotion, while cognitive control is typically considered as the basis of the “rationality”. For example, voluntary inhibition of inappropriate emotional responses is crucial for adaptive decision-making during social interaction.
People’s cognitive control ability has significant impacts on their decision-making. Development of future-oriented decisions in childhood has been attributed to the growth of cognitive control, while maladaptive decision-making in patients with mental disorders and in elders has also been associated with impairment in cognitive control in these populations. The capacity of cognitive control, i.e., the upper limit of information processing rate of the control system, is an important aspect of cognitive control ability, which may serve the central limit that constrains the availability of mental resource for the control processing during decision-making.
Although the association between cognitive control and decision-making has been well recognized, it has not been well-understood from the perspective of capacity. The main purpose of this topic is to characterize how cognitive control constraints decision-making in terms of both cognitive and neural mechanisms, with a particular emphasis on the capacity limit of cognitive control. It aims to improve our understanding of how to optimize allocation of resources to achieve more rational decision-making in daily life, and may shed light on more targeted intervention of dysfunctions of decision-making by enhancing cognitive control ability.
We welcome original research, meta-analyses, hypothesis and theory, and reviews that related to the following topics:
• Association between cognitive control and decision-making style in normal populations and the unique contribution of the capacity in this association
• Contribution of development of cognitive control capacity to the developmental trajectory of decision-making
• Impact of impairment in cognitive control capacity on individual’s decision-making in clinical population, and the effect of intervention aiming to enhance cognitive control on individual’s decision-making
• The role of cognitive control as a cognitive construct in decision-making and how the cognitive control capacity constraints decision-making
Keywords: Cognitive control, decision-making, capacity, emotion-cognition interaction, individual difference
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