The Wiley Handbook of Cognitive Control, First Edition. Edited by Tobias Egner. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Thorny Conceptual Issues How should we understand the status of mental terms such as ‘perception’, ‘attention’, ‘motivation’, ‘cognition’, and ‘emotion’? These terms, which are often the titles of text- book chapters, are frequently conceptualised in a fairly independent fashion. Thus, for example, perception and cognition are distinct entities (though it is accepted that they interact). Although this approach is useful in organising a textbook (or sessions of a large conference), it is poorly suited to understanding the brain. That is because the mapping of structure and function in the brain is highly complex and does not respect linguistic boundaries (‘perception’, ‘attention’, etc.). Indeed, I argue that reification (literally, ‘thing‐ification’) of these linguistic terms leads to an impoverished conceptualisation of the brain. Let us examine an example involving motivation. Methodologically, disentangling the con- tributions of cognition and motivation to neural signals is far from easy (see Hickey, Chelazzi, & Theeuwes, 2010; Peck, Jangraw, Suzuki, Efem, & Gottlieb, 2009). For example, participants may be instructed via a cue stimulus that a potential reward will result if their performance is both fast and accurate. In such cases, increased brain signals may reflect enhanced attention because subjects are more likely to engage attention when a reward is at stake. Maunsell (2004, pp. 262–263) raised this important point in his discussion of monkey physiology studies of attention: When the effects of spatial attention are examined, subjects are motivated to direct attention to one location or another only by expectations about which location is more likely to be associ- ated with a reward. … Such reward manipulations reliably lead to shifts in attention. … However, these experiments typically provide no basis for assigning changes preferentially to attention or to expectations about reward. In most cases, attention‐related modulation could equally well be described in terms of expectation about rewards because the two are inextricably confounded. Cognitive Control and Emotional Processing Luiz Pessoa 22 0002833501.INDD 394 9/2/2016 4:56:23 PM UNCORRECTED PROOFS