BBC Search Candidate Talk - "A systems level perspective on control"

Humans can easily and flexibly accomplish a wide variety of tasks, with different perceptual, motor, and cognitive demands, depending on their goals. This ability appears to depend on both specialized processing that occurs in individual brain regions and coordinated interactions between brain regions that are organized into large-scale networks. In my research I am interested in investigating the relationship between these two levels of functional organization. I will present an overview of my research, highlighting three projects centered on understanding control-related brain function and their network organization. The first section will focus on task control systems of the brain, providing evidence for the presence of two dissociable control systems, with distinct functional roles. In the second section, I shift to examining how systems across the brain interact with one another, and asking how variable these interactions are across individuals and task states. Finally, I present work from ongoing projects looking at individual differences in brain networks and their relevance to individual differences in control behavior. Together, these projects provide neurobiological constraints on how specialized regions interact to carry out goals.