A Meta‐analysis on the neural basis of planning: Activation likelihood estimation of functional brain imaging results in the Tower of London task

Abstract

The ability to mentally design and evaluate series of future actions has often been studied in terms of planning abilities, commonly using well-structured laboratory tasks like the Tower of London (ToL). Despite a wealth of studies, findings on the specific localization of planning processes within prefrontal cortex (PFC) and on the hemispheric lateralization are equivocal. Here, we address this issue by integrating evidence from two different sources of data: First, we provide a systematic overview of the existing lesion data on planning in the ToL (10 studies, 211 patients) which does not indicate any evidence for a general lateralization of planning processes in (pre)frontal cortex. Second, we report a quantitative meta-analysis with activation likelihood estimation based on 31 functional neuroimaging datasets on the ToL. Separate meta-analyses of the activation patterns reported for Overall Planning (537 participants) and for Planning Complexity (182 participants) congruently show bilateral contributions of mid-dorsolateral PFC, frontal eye fields, supplementary motor area, precuneus, caudate, anterior insula, and inferior parietal cortex in addition to a left-lateralized involvement of rostrolateral PFC. In contrast to previous attributions of planning-related brain activity to the entire dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and either its left or right homolog derived from single studies on the ToL, the present meta-analyses stress the pivotal role specifically of the mid-dorsolateral part of PFC (mid-dlPFC), presumably corresponding to Brodmann Areas 46 and 9/46, and strongly argue for a bilateral rather than lateralized involvement of the dlPFC in planning in the ToL. Hum Brain Mapp 38:396-413, 2017. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Frontal Midline Theta Reflects Cognitive Control During Planning

“…Previous studies have reported that PFC has a critical role during cognitive planning (Kirsch et al, 2006;Newman, Carpenter, Varma, & Just, 2003;Owen et al, 1996;Nitschke et al, 2017) and the present results show that cognitive planning induces a FMθ activity (Figures 4-8) originating in PFC, specifically SF and ACC (Figure 9). These results are in line with previous studies on higher order cognitive functions (Cavanagh & Frank, 2014).…”

“…Neuroimaging studies have provided valuable evidence about the critical role of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in cognitive control, including planning. The most traditional paradigm used in those studies to evaluate planning is the Tower of London Task (TOL) (Shallice, 1982;Unterrainer et al, 2004) which suggested an important implication of the dorsolateral PFC (DLPFC) (Nitschke et al, 2017), the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and the superior parietal lobe (SPL), among other brain regions (Kirsch et al, 2006;Newman, Carpenter, Varma, & Just, 2003;Owen, Doyon, Petrides & Evans, 1996). Besides TOL, there are others traditional tests that measure planning: Porteus (1959) proposed the Porteus Maze Task which has been widely used to study planning skills in a PFC-dependent visuospatial context in healthy control and neuropsychiatric population (Gallhofer, Bauer, Lis, Krieger, & Gruppe, 1996;Krieger, Lis, & Gallhofer, 2001;Lee, Chou, Li, Wan, & Yen, 2007;Lezak, 1995;Peters & Jones, 1951;Tremblay et al, 1994).…”

Voxel‐based morphometry in creative writers: Grey matter increase in a prefronto‐thalamic‐cerebellar network

“…Writing per se activates a large network of regions, including the bilateral BA 9 of the prefrontal cortex, thalamus, cerebellum and bilateral parietal and left temporal areas (Yuan & Brown, 2015). The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (BA 9 and 46) has been linked to executive functions, such as working memory and planning processes in complex cognitive tasks (e.g., Nitschke, Köstering, Finkel, Weiller, & Kaller, 2017). In the context of language processing, the left BA 9 was active during idiomatic sentence processing that requires additional resources compared to literal language processing (Lauro, Tettamanti, Cappa, & Papagno, 2008).…”

Cerebellar development and its mediation role in cognitive planning in childhood

“…It is known that cognitive planning is considered as a function subserved by the dorsolateral frontal cortex (Beauchamp, Dagher, Aston, & Doyon, ; Newman, Carpenter, Varma, & Just, ; Nitschke, Kostering, Finkel, Weiller, & Kaller, ; Schall et al, ; Wagner, Koch, Reichenbach, Sauer, & Schlosser, ). The Tower of London task (Shallice, ) is widely used to investigate the cognitive planning ability, which requires participants to imagine a complex sequence of steps to move blocks from one position to another under specific constraints.…”