The central executive as a search process: Priming exploration and exploitation across domains.

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Abstract
The trade off between exploration and exploitation is common to a wide variety of problems involving search in space and mind The prevalence of this trade off and its neurological underpinnings led us to propose domain general cognitive search processes (Hills Todd & Goldstone 2008) We propose further that these are consistent with the idea of a central executive search process that combines goal handling across subgoal hierarchies In the present study we investigate 3 aspects of this proposal First the existence of a unitary central executive search process should allow priming from 1 search task to another and at multiple hierarchical levels We confirm this by showing cross domain priming from a spatial search task to 2 different cognitive levels within a lexical search task Second given the neural basis of the proposed generalized cognitive search process and the evidence that the central executive is primarily engaged during complex tasks we hypothesize that priming should require search in the sense of a self regulated making and testing of sequential predictions about the world This was confirmed by showing that when participants were allowed to collect spatial resources without searching for them no priming occurred Finally we provide a mechanism for the underlying search process and investigate 3 alternative hypotheses for subgoal hierarchies using the central executive as a search process model (CESP) CESP envisions the central executive as having both emergent and unitary processes with one of its roles being a generalized cognitive search process that navigates goal hierarchies by mediating persistence on and switching between subgoals
Funding Information
  • National Institutes of Health (HD 07475)
  • National Science Foundation (0910218)