Silvia Bunge
Assistant Research Psychologist
Research Biography
The Cognitive Control & Development Laboratory at UC Berkeley uses behavioral and brain imaging techniques to examine the brain mechanisms underlying our ability to produce goal-relevant behavior.
Cognitive control refers to the set of processes that underlie the ability to control our thoughts and actions.
Putative control processes include, but are not limited to:
- transforming and reordering information held in working memory (manipulation)
- keeping irrelevant information out of mind (interference suppression)
- selecting from among a number of possible responses (response selection)
- inhibiting inappropriate response tendencies (response inhibition)
Broadly speaking, the ability to control our behavior develops during childhood and reaches mature levels only late in adolescence. However, different control processes may develop at different rates, depending on the rate of change of the underlying neural structures.
Disturbances of cognitive control are common to a number of neurological disorders, including schizophrenia, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Tourette Syndrome, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In a number of disorders, difficulty with cognitive control emerges during childhood.
The following questions motivate the lab's research:
- Which of the putative cognitive control processes are fundamental, and which are redundant?
- What are the nueral mechanisms underlying different types of cognitive control?
- What are the neurodevelopmental changes that underlie the typical development of cognitive control?
- What are the neural underpinnings of deficient cognitive control in various neurodevelopmental disorders, and what can be done to improve long-term outcomes?
Of great relevance to the ways in which we control our behavior is an understanding of how we regulate our emotions. Thus, research in the Cognitive Control Laboratory is informed by research on emotion regulation and individual differences therein.
Selected Publications
Crone EA, Wendelken C, Donohue S, van Leijenhorst L, Bunge SA. Neurocognitive development of the ability to manipulate information in working memory. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2006 Jun 13; 103(24): 9315-20.
Crone EA, Wendelken C, Donohue SE, Bunge SA. Neural evidence for dissociable components of task-switching. Cereb Cortex. 2006 Apr; 16(4): 475-86.
Bunge SA, Wendelken C, Badre D, Wagner AD. Analogical reasoning and prefrontal cortex: evidence for separable retrieval and integration mechanisms. Cereb Cortex. 2005 Mar; 15(3): 239-49.
Bunge SA. How we use rules to select actions: a review of evidence from cognitive neuroscience. Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2004 Dec: 4(4): 564-79.
Bunge SA, Kahn I, Wallis JD, Miller EK, Wagner AD. Nueral circuits subserving the retrieval and maintenance of abstract rules. J Neurophysiol. 2003 Nov: 90(5): 3419-28.
Silvia Bunge Research Biography, April 2008