Self-organized executive control functions

Executive control incorporates cognitive functions involved in the control and management of other cognitive processes. Such high-level skills are hard to be explored with brain imaging studies because they require complex and persistent experimental procedures. Alternatively, computational modeling may provide a new way to indirectly explore executive control mechanisms. The current work adopts this latter approach to explore possible characteristics of executive control, focusing particularly on behavioral rule switching and confidence neurodynamics in artificial agents. To this end, our study explores a robotic version of the classical Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, incorporating also the option of betting. Our ability to perform multiple and statistically independent computational experiments together with the in-depth study of the mechanisms created in the artificial cognitive systems, provides suggestions for the executive control aspects of the human brain.