Juri D. Kropotov

Human behavior is goal directed and flexible. The flexibility requires two core capacities: 1) the capacity to reactively select and implement actions in a goal-directed manner, 2) the capacity to predict the actions and their outcomes.  Theoretically these two features are reflected in a dual model of cognitive control and a theory of predictive error.  In our laboratory we 1) designed a behavioral paradigm for studying those operations in experimental settings, 2) developed mathematical methods of bland source separation for extracting hidden components from event-related potentials.  The paper presents new findings obtained in the laboratory and a theory of structural-functional mechanisms of the system of cognitive control in man.