Frontal cortex and the hierarchical control of behavior

By David Badre, Derek Evan Nee. 2017

Subfields: Behavioral Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Aperiodic neural timescales in prefrontal cortex dilate with increased task abstraction (2025, unknown): “That is, caudal regions of the frontal cortex track the planning and execution of concrete motor action, whereas more rostral regions track progressively higher-order, abstract task goals and context (20,29,66–72).”
Hierarchical Reconfiguration of Neurocognitive Task Set Representations Mediates Cognitive Flexibility (2026, unknown): “Based on prior work implicating the middle frontal gyrus (MFG) in contextual encoding and hierarchical cognitive control (Badre & D’Esposito, 2007; Badre & Nee, 2018; Nee & D'Esposito, 2016), we predicted that context reconfiguration (EDS) would elicit a larger neural distance in MFG than…”
Mental graphs structure the storage and retrieval of visuomotor associations (2025, unknown): “Parallelization in these tasks is thought to be possible due to a hypothesized hierarchical gradient of representational abstraction in the prefrontal cortex 53,54 , where different areas of the prefrontal cortex can process different task rules/levels in parallel.”
Novel Verbal Instructions Recruit Abstract Neural Patterns of Time-Variable Information Dimensionality (2025, methodology): “Previous research has proposed hierarchical processing of task sets (Badre & Nee, 2018; Cole et al., 2011) with studies showing stronger representations for higher-level variables (Woolgar et al., 2011a; Woolgar et al., 2011b; Cellier et al., 2022).”
Multiplexed Levels of Cognitive Control through Delta and Theta Neural Oscillations (2024, background): “…to appropriate actions) and “ contextual control ” (stimulus – action associations dependence on environmental context) in hierarchical control experiments (Badre & Nee, 2018), but other levels of control have been proposed, see Pitts and Nee (2022), Nee (2021), Nee and D ’ Esposito (2016, 2017).”
Augmenting single-session behavioral activation for depression with delta-beta tACS: Preliminary investigation of a double-blind placebo-controlled randomized pilot clinical trial (2025, unknown): “Furthermore, the motor system is the primary output layer of a hierarchical action control system that spans the rostral-caudal axis of the lateral prefrontal cortex [37,38].”
Multimodal neuroimaging of hierarchical cognitive control. (2024, methodology): “If that is the case, it indicates that policy abstraction might not be the only relevant factor for the organization of the frontal lobes (see also (Badre, 2024; Badre & Nee, 2018)).”
Hierarchical consciousness: the Nested Observer Windows model (2024, background): “At other times, we do have the experience of intentionally assembling a complex gestalt perception from a few component concepts; but this manipulation occurs at a high level of abstraction, as in hierarchical cognitive control tasks (Collins and Frank 2013, Badre and Nee 2018).”
A guide for concurrent TMS-fMRI to investigate functional brain networks (2022, methodology): “These findings provide fundamental new insights into top-down signals, frontal-striatal and cortico-thalamic circuits, and cortical hierarchies (Ruff et al., 2006, 2008; Badre and D’Esposito, 2009; Driver et al., 2009; Feredoes et al., 2011; Ruff, 2013; Heinen et al., 2014; Leitão et al., 2015; Badr”
Causal role of cross-frequency coupling in distinct components of cognitive control (2021, background): “For example, the rostral-caudal axis of the frontal cortex is organized hierarchically where the most caudal regions implement concrete motor actions and anterior regions are involved in motor planning, decision-making, and behavioral monitoring (Koechlin et al., 2003; Badre and Nee, 2018).”
Prefrontal Hierarchical Control of Corticomuscular Coherence in Stroke (2026, unknown): “Reﬁnement of motor output from PFC likely involves both excitatory and inhibitory pathways [77], [78].”
Higher integration of the whole-brain resting state theta band network is associated with spatial working memory (2026, unknown): “In contrast, the weaker and less stable effects in the beta band likely reflect more local or sensorimotor-related dynamics that are less directly relevant to SWM. Theta band also plays important role in cognitive control, an essential component of working memory (Badre and Nee, 2018).”