Crum, James E.; (2023) Contributions of Human Prefrontal Cortex to the Recogitation of Thought. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Human beings have a unique ability to not only verbally articulate past and present experiences, as well as potential future ones, but also evaluate the mental representations of such things. Some evaluations do little good, in that they poorly reflect facts, create needless emotional distress, and contribute to the obstruction of personal goals, whereas some evaluations are the converse: They are grounded in logic, empiricism, and pragmatism and, therefore, are functional rather than dysfunctional. The aim of non-pharmacological mental health interventions is to revise dysfunctional thoughts into more adaptive, healthier ones; however, the neurocognitive mechanisms driving cognitive change have hitherto remained unclear. Therefore, this thesis examines the role of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in this aspect of human higher cognition using the relatively new method of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Chapter 1 advances recogitation as the mental ability on which cognitive restructuring largely depends, concluding that, as a cognitive task, it is a form of open-ended human problem-solving that uses metacognitive and reasoning faculties. Because these faculties share similar executive resources, Chapter 2 discusses the systems in the brain involved in controlled information processing, specifically the nature of executive functions and their neural bases. Chapter 3 builds on these ideas to propose an information-processing model of recogitation, which predicts the roles of different subsystems localized within the PFC and elsewhere in the context of emotion regulation. This chapter also highlights several theoretical and empirical challenges to investigating this neurocognitive theory and proposes some solutions, such as to use experimental designs that are more ecologically valid. Chapter 4 focuses on a neuroimaging method that is best suited to investigating questions of spatial localization in ecological experiments, namely functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Chapter 5 then demonstrates a novel approach to investigating the neural bases of interpersonal interactions in clinical settings using fNIRS. Chapter 6 explores physical activity as a ‘bottom-up’ approach to upregulating the PFC, in that it might help clinical populations with executive deficits to regulate their mental health from the ‘top-down’. Chapter 7 addresses some of the methodological issues of investigating clinical interactions and physical activity in more naturalistic settings by assessing an approach to recovering functional events from observed brain data. Chapter 8 draws several conclusions about the role of the PFC in improving psychological as well as physiological well-being, particularly that rostral PFC is inextricably involved in the cognitive effort to modulate dysfunctional thoughts, and proposes some important future directions for ecological research in cognitive neuroscience; for example, psychotherapy is perhaps too physically stagnant, so integrating exercise into treatment environments might boost the effectiveness of intervention strategies.

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