Cognitive control is an executive function that refers to the ability to direct behavior toward a goal in the presence of conflict and is an integral process of many different cognitive paradigms. The inferior lateral frontal and anterior cingulate (ACC) cortices are key regions implicated in cognitive control [35] and consistently reported altered in patients with schizophrenia [36]. Several studies have explored dysfunction of ACC activation in the context of cognitive control paradigms in unaffected relatives of patients with schizophrenia [14, 16, 37, 38] with somewhat variable results, including decrease [37 ·], increase [38], or no difference [14, 16] in ACC activity (Supplementary Table 1.B). In contrast, altered PFC activation has been consistently demonstrated in healthy relatives during cognitive control tasks, although its independence from other cognitive domains, such as working memory (and vice versa) is unclear since this question has not been explicitly explored. Recently, investigators have started to study the abnormal coupling in cognitive control circuits as a potential intermediate phenotype and preliminary results suggest a decrease of the coupling within prefrontal regions in healthy relatives of patients
