Could you talk about intentions? Do you think it’s a misconception to think of system II as the intentional system, or do you consider it to be an accurate term?
Excellent question. It would take a lot to present all of the evidence, but working memory still seems to me to remain the best distinction, because the many things that you refer to as ‘intention’ also require working memory to function. Intentionality is probably not a bad term to use, but still noncentral I think.
Everything we want to talk about is in the prefrontal cortex. There are four major components worth distinguishing: lateral prefrontal cortex, frontal pole, medial frontal cortex, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The entire prefrontal cortex, but the lateral prefrontal cortex in particular, is a key component of working memory. This is evidenced by the poor performance of patients with neurological lesions in the prefrontal cortex on delayed-response tasks. Also, physiological studies on the actual cells in primates, and functional-imaging studies on humans, have shown that prefrontal cortex activation remains even after the original stimulus is absent. We are not quickly caching this information and constantly editing the cache, we are maintaining the information in a low-capacity, dynamic memory store, just like computers do with their RAM. All of the caching stuff is in other regions. There are also regions of the cortex responsible for goal-oriented behavior, which involve the generation of a hierarchy of goals and subgoals, and the aforementioned patients often also do poorly on this, for one, because they have difficulty imagining consequences (takes working memory and selection of information to infer consequences, i.e. counterfactual surgery) and also, because it seems they have a problem selecting task relevant information. So another big part of it is a selection mechanism that filters out the irrelevant parts of cached information, but notice that the only reason to do this is because you’re trying to figure out whether or not you want it to take up space in working memory. Also notice that this failure at selecting relevant information is an explanation for why these patients have intact recognition memory but poor recency memory (ability to recognize how long ago they obtained some memory). Recognition memory is all cached data, recency memory requires you to select the parts of the cached data that are relevant to figuring out when the data was observed. I’m probably missing a lot of important distinctions and details still, so don’t consider this the final word; see Chapter 13 of Gazzaniga, Ivry, and Mangun’s Cognitive Neuroscience if you really want to get on top of this. Remarkably smooth read for the level of the content it contains.
Could you talk about intentions? Do you think it’s a misconception to think of system II as the intentional system, or do you consider it to be an accurate term?
Excellent question. It would take a lot to present all of the evidence, but working memory still seems to me to remain the best distinction, because the many things that you refer to as ‘intention’ also require working memory to function. Intentionality is probably not a bad term to use, but still noncentral I think.
Everything we want to talk about is in the prefrontal cortex. There are four major components worth distinguishing: lateral prefrontal cortex, frontal pole, medial frontal cortex, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The entire prefrontal cortex, but the lateral prefrontal cortex in particular, is a key component of working memory. This is evidenced by the poor performance of patients with neurological lesions in the prefrontal cortex on delayed-response tasks. Also, physiological studies on the actual cells in primates, and functional-imaging studies on humans, have shown that prefrontal cortex activation remains even after the original stimulus is absent. We are not quickly caching this information and constantly editing the cache, we are maintaining the information in a low-capacity, dynamic memory store, just like computers do with their RAM. All of the caching stuff is in other regions. There are also regions of the cortex responsible for goal-oriented behavior, which involve the generation of a hierarchy of goals and subgoals, and the aforementioned patients often also do poorly on this, for one, because they have difficulty imagining consequences (takes working memory and selection of information to infer consequences, i.e. counterfactual surgery) and also, because it seems they have a problem selecting task relevant information. So another big part of it is a selection mechanism that filters out the irrelevant parts of cached information, but notice that the only reason to do this is because you’re trying to figure out whether or not you want it to take up space in working memory. Also notice that this failure at selecting relevant information is an explanation for why these patients have intact recognition memory but poor recency memory (ability to recognize how long ago they obtained some memory). Recognition memory is all cached data, recency memory requires you to select the parts of the cached data that are relevant to figuring out when the data was observed. I’m probably missing a lot of important distinctions and details still, so don’t consider this the final word; see Chapter 13 of Gazzaniga, Ivry, and Mangun’s Cognitive Neuroscience if you really want to get on top of this. Remarkably smooth read for the level of the content it contains.