Left, but Not Right, Rostrolateral Prefrontal Cortex Meets a Stringent Test of the Relational Integration Hypothesis (original) (raw)
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The role of Area 10 (BA10) in human multitasking and in social cognition: A lesion study
Neuropsychologia, 2011
A role for rostral prefrontal cortex (BA10) has been proposed in multitasking, in particular, the selection and maintenance of higher order internal goals while other sub-goals are being performed. BA10 has also been implicated in the ability to infer someone else's feelings and thoughts, often referred to as theory of mind. While most of the data to support these views come from functional neuroimaging studies, lesion studies are scant. In the present study, we compared the performance of a group of frontal patients whose lesions involved BA10, a group of frontal patients whose lesions did not affect this area (nonBA10), and a group of healthy controls on tests requiring multitasking and complex theory of mind judgments. Only the group with lesions involving BA10 showed deficits on multitasking and theory of mind tasks when compared with control subjects. NonBA10 patients performed more poorly than controls on an executive function screening tool, particularly on measures of response inhibition and abstract reasoning, suggesting that theory of mind and multitasking deficits following lesions to BA10 cannot be explained by a general worsening of executive function. In addition, we searched for correlations between performance and volume of damage within different subregions of BA10. Significant correlations were found between multitasking performance and volume of damage in right lateral BA10, and between theory of mind and total BA10 lesion volume. These findings stress the potential pivotal role of BA10 in higher order cognitive functions.► BA10 is thought to be involved in multitasking and theory of mind (ToM). ► Patients with lesions outside BA10 perform poorly on executive tasks. ► Patients with lesions involving BA10 perform poorly on multitasking and ToM tasks. ► Multitasking abilities are correlated with volume of damage in right lateral BA10. ► Lesions to BA10 produce specific impairments in higher order cognitive functions.
There are many reasons for supposing that rostral PFC (approximating brain area 10 in humans) might play a critical role in human cognition. For instance, it is the largest single subsection of the prefrontal cortex, and is also relatively bigger in humans than in any other animal. It also matures very late, and has an unusual architecture. However until very recently virtually nothing was known about the functions of this brain region. But evidence from neuroimaging and human neuropsychology together are now providing critical constraints for theorizing. In particular, although activations of rostral PFC are found in neuroimaging studies of a very wide variety of functions, the deficits experienced by patients with damage to this brain region seem remarkably specific. Rostral PFC lesions need not impair intellect, simple memory functions, or many other abilities. However they can lead to a syndrome of high-level behavioural disorganization, in which impairments in multitasking and ...
Rostrolateral prefrontal cortex: Domain-general or domain-sensitive?
Human Brain Mapping, 2012
The ability to jointly consider several structured mental representations, or relations, is fundamental to human cognition. Prior studies have consistently linked this capacity for relational integration to rostrolateral prefrontal cortex (RLPFC). Here, we sought to test two competing hypotheses: (1) RLPFC processes relations in a domain-general manner, interacting with different brain regions as a function of the type of lower-level relations that must be integrated; or (2) A dorsal-ventral gradient exists within RLPFC, such that relational integration in the visuospatial domain involves relatively more dorsal RLPFC than integration in the semantic domain. To this end, we examined patterns of fMRI activation and functional connectivity during performance of visuospatial and semantic variants of a relational matching task. Across the two task variants, the regions that were most strongly engaged during relational comparison were left RLPFC and left intraparietal sulcus (IPS). Within left RLPFC, there was considerable overlap in activation for the semantic and visuospatial tasks. However, visuospatial task activation peaks were located dorsally to the semantic task peaks. In addition, RLPFC exhibited differential functional connectivity on the two tasks, interacting with different brain regions as a function of the type of relations being compared. While neurons throughout RLPFC may share the function of integrating diverse inputs, individual RLPFC neurons may have privileged access to particular representations depending on their anatomical inputs, organized along a dorsal-ventral gradient. Thus, RLPFC is wellpositioned as a locus of abstraction from concrete, domain-specific details to the general principles and rules that enable higher-level cognition. Hum Brain Mapp 00:000-000, 2011. V