Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 136 (2022) 104600
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Editorial
Motivational and Cognitive Control: From motor inhibition to social decision making
From September 16th until September 18th, 2019, the 7th Interna­
tional Symposium on Motivational and Cognitive Control (MCC 2019)
was held in Berlin, Germany. The International Symposium on Moti­
vational and Cognitive Control is a series of small meetings with up to
200 participants that has occurred semi-regularly every three to four
years since the first meeting in Jena in 2000. It is an interdisciplinary
meeting fostering scientific exchange of experts and young researchers
on the neuronal and computational mechanisms of cognitive control,
decision making, and motivation. MCC 2019 was again very successful
in bringing together research fields and methodological approaches
encompassing cognitive and systems neuroscience, experimental psy­
chology, neuroeconomics, and computational modeling in humans, non-
human primates and rodents. As members of the organizing committee,
we invited speakers and discussants to contribute review articles and
commentary papers to this special issue in Neuroscience and Biobe­
havioral Reviews which represents the breadth of the field, the current
state of the art, and future directions of research.
The pandemic has had a massive impact on everyone, contributors,
editors, and reviewers, such that the special issue appears somewhat
smaller and later than anticipated. Nevertheless, the result of this effort
is a great overview of ongoing research in the field of motivational and
cognitive control. The review papers are grouped into the following
sections: a) Cognitive-control and decision-making signals in the brain;
b) Motor inhibition and interference control; c) Cognitive control and
decision making in social contexts; and d) Cognitive control and decision
making in clinical populations.
The section “Cognitive-control and decision-making signals in the
brain” consists of four excellent reviews covering the breadth of the field
and demonstrating the complex interactions between cognitive control,
motivation, decision-making and learning. While previous review arti­
cles often interpret cognitive control from a value-based choice
perspective thereby yielding important insights into the mechanisms of
cognitive control (Holroyd and Verguts, 2021; Shenhav et al., 2017;
Ullsperger et al., 2014), Fromer and Shenhav (2022) provide a com­
plementary view: they demonstrate how taking a cognitive-control
perspective unravels new insights into the mechanisms of motivation
and value-based choice. At the very heart of the topic of MCC they
highlight the complexity of multi-level interactions of cognitive control
and decision making which influence how people make decisions, how
different goals shape the evaluation of choice options, and how people
monitor their decisions and make adjustments at multiple levels and
time scales. Yee et al. (2022) investigate how aversive motivation drives
cognitive control. They review findings in animals and humans as well
as computational neuroscience giving insight into the complexity of
aversive and mixed incentives. Key to understanding aversive
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104600
Available online 4 March 2022
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motivation is to differentiate negative reinforcement and punishment.
Their review provides an excellent basis for development of novel
experimental approaches tackling the interaction of motivation and
control with high precision. Yu et al. (2021) address the flexible use of
information (often inferred from outcomes of previous decisions) in
various contexts. The authors review the psychological and neural
mechanisms behind adaptive learning and structure learning through
the lens of optimal inference to outline how people pool together rele­
vant information, demarcate contexts, prevent interference between
information collected in different contexts, and transfer information
from one context to another. Finally, Wittkuhn et al. (2021) address the
timely question of how replay, i.e., the reactivation of experience-based
activity patterns, can benefit decision making and learning. To this end
they review results from research in humans and animals as well as from
machine learning. In their commentary on this section, Wurm and
Steinhauser (2022) point out that in everyday life, goals are often not
unidimensional. Instead, different goals often compete with each other
on different hierarchical levels and dilemmas need to be solved (e.g. to
explore or exploit, to stress accuracy or speed, etc.). These factors in­
fluence our decision-making process when deciding which goal to pri­
oritize. This process can be optimized when we learn from past
experiences. Replaying past experiences might be a mechanism to
optimize learning and thereby helps to improve proactive control which,
again, suggests a close interaction between cognitive control processes
and value-based decision-making.
The section “Motor inhibition and interference control” comprises
two review articles and a commentary. Isherwood et al. (2021) present a
meta-analysis of fMRI studies addressing the networks involved in motor
inhibition and in interference resolution, respectively. The most sur­
prising finding of this study is the absence of consistent subcortical
activation patterns in both the global inhibition and interference tasks.
Diesburg and Wessel (2021) provide a review on neural mechanisms and
neurophysiological markers of inhibition and present an adaptation of
the pause-then-cancel model of action stopping to humans. As Huster
et al. (2022) discuss in their section commentary, both articles challenge
the prevalent neural model of stopping and emphasize the importance of
cognitive processes other than inhibition for action stopping and inter­
ference resolution. Despite some disagreement about the utility of
behavioral (stop-signal reaction time) and neurophysiological measures
in gauging inhibition, the articles in this section underscore that the
construct of response inhibition is in need of reform.
In the section ’Cognitive control and decision-making in social con­
texts’, three articles (Braunsdorf et al., 2021; Noritake et al., 2021;
Terenzi et al., 2021) address different aspects of social cognition. In his
commentary on this section, Sallet (2022) describes how these articles
Editorial
complement each other and points out the phylogenic origins of social
decision-making. Together, these articles highlight the complexities of
social decision-making and show the valuable contributions of
cross-species comparisons. Terenzi et al. (2021) focus on modulating
factors of social decision-making. They distinguish between external and
internal modulating factors that both influence decisions in social con­
texts. External factors are, for instance, monitoring other people’s ac­
tions and deriving their intentions and social identities. Internal
modulating factors comprise, for example, personality traits, emotions,
neurotransmitter levels and cognitive biases. Noritake et al. (2021)
added a discussion on the contribution of subcortical social information
processing to social decision-making, while Braunsdorf et al. (2021)
highlight the role of the temporal cortex in high-level cognitive func­
tions that are required in social contexts.
The section ‘Cognitive control in clinical populations’ comprises
three articles which link fundamental research on cognitive control with
findings in patients with mental disorders. Kirschner and Klein (2022)
and Dixon et al. (2022) address cognitive control in schizophrenia pa­
tients. In their review, Kirschner and Klein show that EEG correlates of
internal error processing, mainly the error-related negativity is consis­
tently blunted in schizophrenia and they interpret this as a result of
disrupted midfrontal theta activity. Dixon et al. (2022) add a metabolic
perspective to this by reviewing studies measuring GABA and Gluta­
mate/Glutamine levels in frontal regions of schizophrenia patients using
magnetic resonance spectroscopy. While the literature is rather het­
erogeneous, they compile a number of overarching findings of reduced
metabolite levels in frontal cortex associated with schizophrenia and
their link to cognitive control functions. Hildebrandt et al. (2021) focus
on the link of inhibitory control and substance use disorders. In partic­
ular they discuss the need to study the relationship of the degree of
substance use disorder, the substance-related problems resulting from
them and alterations in inhibition-related neural activity. They give a
clear outlook on outstanding research questions and how they should be
addressed. A major issue is a small sample size such that multicentric
studies appear most promising.
In sum, the present special issue gives a broad overview on the
current research on motivational and cognitive control and we hope it
will spark further debates and novel research in the field. We also hope
that it will motivate researchers to look forward to the next MCC
meeting to be held in Lyon, France, in the near future.
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 136 (2022) 104600
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Markus Ullspergera,b
a
Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany
b
Center for Behavioral Brain Sciences, Magdeburg, Germany
Claudia Danielmeier
University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK