ReviewJournal of cognitive neuroscience2017
Control without Controllers: Toward a Distributed Neuroscience of Executive Control.
Review in Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed, 73 citations in OpenAlex.
- The prefrontal cortex across scales: laminar architecture, white-matter constraints, and distributed control in cognition.Brain structure & function · 2026Review
- Research progress on the role of the locus coeruleus in cognitive function.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Review
- Fundamental dimensions of real-time word recognition in challenging listening conditions exhibit within-subject stability and link to outcomes.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2025Article
- Basis of executive functions in fine-grained architecture of cortical and subcortical human brain networks.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- Asymmetric coding of reward prediction errors in human insula and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Strategies, debates, and adversarial collaboration in working memory: The 51st Bartlett Lecture.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2023Article
- Neuromodulatory control of complex adaptive dynamics in the brain.Interface focus · 2023Review
- Dissociation and integration of outcome and state uncertainty signals in cognitive control.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- Parallel processing relies on a distributed, low-dimensional cortico-cerebellar architecture.Network neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2023Article
- The role of prefrontal cortex in cognitive control and executive function.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2022Review
- A new era for executive function research: On the transition from centralized to distributed executive functioning.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2021Review
- The case against economic values in the orbitofrontal cortex (or anywhere else in the brain).Behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- What affects the magnitude of age-related dual-task costs in working memory? The role of stimulus domain and access to semantic representations.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2021Article
- Structure-informed functional connectivity driven by identifiable and state-specific control regions.Network neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2021Article
- Automated markerless pose estimation in freely moving macaques with OpenMonkeyStudio.Nature communications · 2020Article
- Heuristics and optimal solutions to the breadth-depth dilemma.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Partial integration of the components of value in anterior cingulate cortex.Behavioral neuroscience · 2020Article
- How Do Scientific Views Change? Notes From an Extended Adversarial Collaboration.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2020Article
- Activity in orbitofrontal neuronal ensembles reflects inhibitory control.The European journal of neuroscience · 2020Article
- A practical guide to methodological considerations in the controllability of structural brain networks.Journal of neural engineering · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Executive control refers to the regulation of cognition and behavior by mental processes and is a hallmark of higher cognition. Most approaches to understanding its mechanisms begin with the assumption that our brains have anatomically segregated and functionally specialized control modules. The modular approach is intuitive: Control is conceptually distinct from basic mental processing, so an organization that reifies that distinction makes sense. An alternative approach sees executive control as self-organizing principles of a distributed organization. In distributed systems, control and controlled processes are colocalized within large numbers of dispersed computational agents. Control then is often an emergent consequence of simple rules governing the interaction between agents. Because these systems are unfamiliar and unintuitive, here we review several well-understood examples of distributed control systems, group living insects and social animals, and emphasize their parallels with neural systems. We then reexamine the cognitive neuroscience literature on executive control for evidence that its neural control systems may be distributed.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.