Cognitive control & the anterior cingulate cortex: Necessity & coherence.

Influential theories of complex behaviour invoke the notion of cognitive control modulated by conflict between counterfactual actions. Medial frontal cortex, notably the anterior cingulate cortex, has been variously posited as critical to such conflict detection, resolution, or monitoring, largely based on correlative data from functional imaging. Examining performance on the most widely used "conflict" task-Stroop-in a large cohort of patients with focal brain injury (N = 176), we compare anatomical patterns of lesion-inferred neural substrate dependence to those derived from functional imaging, meta-analytically summarised.

The minimal computational substrate of fluid intelligence.

The quantification of cognitive powers rests on identifying a behavioural task that depends on them. Such dependence cannot be assured, for the powers a task invokes cannot be experimentally controlled or constrained a priori, resulting in unknown vulnerability to failure of specificity and generalisability. Evaluating a compact version of Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM), a widely used clinical test of fluid intelligence, we show that LaMa, a self-supervised artificial neural network trained solely on the completion of partially masked images of natural environmental scenes, achieves representative human-level test scores a prima vista, without any task-specific inductive bias or training.

Characterizing phonemic fluency by transfer learning with deep language models.

Though phonemic fluency tasks are traditionally indexed by the number of correct responses, the underlying disorder may shape the specific choice of words-both correct and erroneous. We report the first comprehensive qualitative analysis of incorrect and correct words generated on the phonemic ('S') fluency test, in a large sample of patients ( = 239) with focal, unilateral frontal or posterior lesions and healthy controls ( = 136). We conducted detailed qualitative analyses of the single words generated in the phonemic fluency task using categorical descriptions for different types of errors, low-frequency words and clustering/switching.

Lifespan normative data (18-89 years) for Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices Set I.

Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM) Set I is a validated and brief test of fluid intelligence, ideal for use in busy clinical settings. However, there is a dearth of normative data allowing an accurate interpretation of APM scores. To address this, we present normative data from across the adult lifespan (18-89 years) for the APM Set I.