Review articleTransdiagnostic impairment of cognitive control in mental illness
Section snippets
A common underlying cognitive control factor: behavior
Latent variable analysis of performance on a wide array of neuropsychological tasks has shown that intact cognition has a characteristic pattern of interrelated executive functions throughout the lifespan from childhood (Lehto et al., 2003) through middle (Miyake et al., 2000) and older adulthood (Adrover-Roig et al., 2012). For example, Miyake et al., 2000, Miyake and Friedman, 2012) have demonstrated that updating (i.e., monitoring and refreshing working memory store), inhibition (resisting
Summary, limitations, & future directions
Accumulating findings have revealed that psychiatric disorders share a common factor or vulnerability to dysfunction. Similarly, historic conceptualizations of distinct cognitive domains have been superseded by models that include a higher order common cognitive control/executive function factor. Separate studies suggest this common cognitive control factor may be related to deficits in a frontal-cingulate-parietal-insular network recruited for a wide diversity of cognitive demands.
Conclusions
Consistent with principles of the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project (Kozak and Cuthbert, 2016), the current review implicates disruption of a cognitive control network across disorders. Importantly, this network parallels the multiple demand network intrinsic to adaptive, flexible cognition. Given our prior findings of transdiagnostic gray matter loss in overlapping regions of this network, a parallel is suggested across structural and functional measures of brain dysfunction. Also
Conflict of interest
The authors declare no competing financial interests relevant to this research.
Acknowledgements
LM was supported by National Institute of Mental Health K23 MH104849. AE was supported by the Sierra-Pacific Mental Illness Research, Education and Clinical Center (MIRECC) at the Palo Alto VA.
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