Attention in Task-sets, Planning, and the Prefrontal Cortex

What we pay attention to depends on the context and the task at hand. On the one hand, the prefrontal cortex can modulate how to direct attention outward to the external world. On the other hand, attention to internal states enables metacognition and configuration of internal states using repertoires of memories and skills. I will first discuss ongoing work in which, inspired by the role of attention in affordances and task-sets, we analyze large scale game play data in the XboX 3D game Bleeding Edge in an interpretable way. I will briefly mention ongoing directions including decoding of plans during chess based on eye-tracking. I will conclude with how future models of multi-scale predictive representations could include prefrontal cortical modulation during planning and task performance.