Perspective: The foundations, fortunes, and future of cognitive control research.

This perspective considers the contribution of articles in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance to our understanding of mechanisms of control that coordinate component processes of perception and action into an effective task set. Foundations of this research lie in 20th-century debates about whether the fundamental challenge for control arises from capacity limits of serial, discrete processing stages or conflicts between parallel, continuous processes. Fortunes of the field have flourished in the 21st century with detailed studies of adaptive control supporting both flexible task switching and stable task performance in the face of distraction. Future directions are suggested regarding "macro" levels of control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).