Contextual control of choice performance: behavioral, neurobiological, and neurochemical influences.

An important aspect of decision making is the ability of responses to be controlled by different cues in different situations or contexts, especially when there is conflict between alternative responses or actions.Recently, a context-dependent biconditional task has been developed for rats that mimic some aspects of response conflict seen in human cognitive paradigms, such as the Stroop task. In this task, contextual cues are used to disambiguate conflicting response information provided by audiovisual compound stimuli. Here we review current findings that investigate some of the behavioral, neurobiological, and neurochemical mechanisms that underlie this use of contextual or task-setting information to resolve response conflict, and discuss future ways in which this research can be extended.