Delivery Model Matters for Digital Interventions in Pain Self-Management: Mixed Methods Study.

‘Cognitive control’ is an umbrella term that denotes our ability to use internal goals to guide behavior, as opposed to behavior being merely driven by external stimuli (; ). It encompasses a broad range of cognitive processes, including response inhibition, task switching, conflict-control, working memory updating, multitasking, and planning (; ; ; ). Latent factor models, which capture the common variance across multiple tasks while accounting for task-specific and measurement-related variability, suggest that these processes are supported by both shared and distinct mechanisms (; ; ; ). While cognitive control encompasses a diverse range of processes, two well-studied key functions are (1) the ability to stably maintain current goals (cognitive stability) and (2) the ability to switch between different goals (cognitive flexibility) (). For instance, imagine that you are focusing on reading this paper when your phone buzzes with a notification. Cognitive stability enables you to focus on reading and ignore the distracting notification. However, if you are expecting an important e-mail from your colleague, cognitive flexibility allows you to intentionally switch tasks from reading to checking the notification. Cognitive stability and flexibility are crucial for adaptive behavior in daily life, and are impaired in numerous psychiatric and neurological conditions, including schizophrenia (), Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD; ), and Substance Use Disorder (). Gaining a more precise and informed understanding of the neural bases of these control functions is therefore vital for developing targeted, effective treatments for these disorders and other conditions. The present review supports this goal by synthesizing recent intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) findings on cognitive stability and flexibility. Cognitive stability and flexibility are intimately linked to working memory, a mental system for temporarily storing and processing internal information (; ). For pursuing a particular goal, a procedural working memory () is thought to store and employ ‘task sets’ that specify task-relevant stimuli, goal-appropriate stimulus-response mappings, and the cue, rule, or context specifying which mappings are currently in effect, independently of any particular stimulus (; ; ). Stability and flexibility can be conceptualized as operations on task sets: stability reflects the strength with which the current task set is maintained and shielded from distraction in working memory, while flexibility reflects the ability (and ease) of updating working memory with a different, newly-relevant task set ().