The executive cognitive functions are humans' most advanced component mental operations. Examples of executive functions include manipulating the contents of working memory, inhibiting automatic but inappropriate responses, and flexibly switching between strategies. These functions allow people to make effective decisions, regulate social behavior, and plan ahead. The executive functions are the last to mature in development and are often the first to deteriorate in normal aging as well as mental disorders and neurological injury and disease. Research has yet to fully describe the neural bases of these higher-order mental operations, and understanding the neural bases of the executive functions might provide insight into why some people are better at planning and decision-making than others and allow for more effective intervention and treatment of executive function impairment. The neural bases of the executive functions likely involve networks of neural structures distributed throughout the brain working together in specific temporal sequences, with individual nodes active for only tens of milliseconds. A large literature exists suggesting the prefrontal cortex as a core structure within this network. The research enabled by the dense-sensor array electroencephalography (EEG) system, with extended frontal coverage, investigates the coordinated neural activity underlying the executive functions.
Event-related potentials (ERPs) are scalp recorded neural electrical responses to stimuli and actions embedded in the ongoing EEG. ERPs are an excellent means of assessing the timecourse of functionally relevant neural activity during cognitive processing, and hence a powerful tool for investigating the neural network dynamics that make executive functioning possible. Dense-sensor array EEG, like the 128 channel system here, improves ERP's spatial resolution, allowing better estimation of the neural sources of the scalp-recorded signal. Dense sensor array ERPs allows researchers to examine the neural network activity related to specific cognitive operations. Researchers will use this system to study learning and memory, potentially improving learning strategies, individual differences in risky decision-making (why some individuals make riskier choices than others), attention selection (how the brain may use economic principles, like expected value, to allocate its limited capacity processing resources), and other executive functions, their variability across individuals, and their disruption in neurological injuries (e.g. mild traumatic brain injury) and disease (e.g. Huntington's disease).
