Cognitive control guides behaviour by controlling what, when, and how information is represented in the brain¹. For example, attention controls sensory processing; top-down signals from prefrontal and parietal cortex strengthen the representation of task-relevant stimuli^2,3,4. A similar ‘selection’ mechanism is thought to control the representations held ‘in mind’—in working memory^5,6,7,8,9,10. Here we show that shared neural mechanisms underlie the selection of items from working memory and attention to sensory stimuli. We trained rhesus monkeys to switch between two tasks, either selecting one item from a set of items held in working memory or attending to one stimulus from a set of visual stimuli. Neural recordings showed that similar representations in prefrontal cortex encoded the control of both selection and attention, suggesting that prefrontal cortex acts as a domain-general controller. By contrast, both attention and selection were represented independently in parietal and visual cortex. Both selection and attention facilitated behaviour by enhancing and transforming the representation of the selected memory or attended stimulus. Specifically, during the selection task, memory items were initially represented in independent subspaces of neural activity in prefrontal cortex. Selecting an item caused its representation to transform from its own subspace to a new subspace used to guide behaviour. A similar transformation occurred for attention. Our results suggest that prefrontal cortex controls cognition by dynamically transforming representations to control what and when cognitive computations are engaged.

认知控制通过控制信息在大脑中的表现内容、时间和方式来指导行为¹。例如，注意力控制感觉处理；来自前额叶和顶叶皮层的自上而下的信号加强了与任务相关的刺激^2,3,4的表现。一种类似的“选择”机制被认为可以控制“记住”的表征——在工作记忆中^5,6,7,8,9,10. 在这里，我们表明共享的神经机制是从工作记忆和对感觉刺激的关注中选择项目的基础。我们训练恒河猴在两个任务之间切换，要么从工作记忆中的一组项目中选择一个项目，要么从一组视觉刺激中关注一个刺激。神经记录表明，前额叶皮层中的类似表征编码了对选择和注意力的控制，这表明前额叶皮层充当了一个域一般控制器。相比之下，注意力和选择在顶叶和视觉皮层中独立表示。选择和注意都通过增强和改变所选记忆或参与刺激的表现来促进行为。具体来说，在选择任务期间，记忆项目最初在前额叶皮层神经活动的独立子空间中表示。选择一个项目会导致其表示从其自己的子空间转换为用于指导行为的新子空间。为了引起注意，发生了类似的转变。我们的研究结果表明，前额叶皮层通过动态转换表示来控制认知计算的内容和时间来控制认知。