Frontoparietal Activity with Minimal Decision and Control

Abstract

In the human brain, a well known frontoparietal circuit, including lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC), presupplementary motor area/ anterior cingulate cortex (pre-SMA/ACC), and both the superior and inferior parietal cortex, is involved in cognitive control. One proposal is that the frontoparietal cortex holds a flexible description of attended or task-relevant information, biasing processing in favor of this information in many different parts of the brain. Here, we separate frontoparietal coding of attended information from its active use in behavior. In two experiments, subjects watch a stream of visual stimuli in a fixed location. In the first experiment, there is no task to perform; in the second, decisions are orthogonal to the occurrence of new stimulus events. Even in these simple circumstances, we find that attended stimulus changes give extensive activation of LPFC, pre-SMA/ACC and parietal cortex, whereas unattended changes do not. Even without behavior to control, these classical "control" regions are active in simple update of attended information.

The Neural Bases of the Short-Term Storage of Verbal Information Are Anatomically Variable across Individuals

“…A second is that this activity may represent any of a number of other functions that have been ascribed to the PFC and that might be sensitive to variations in load. These include, but are not limited to, deploying selective attention (Passingham and Sakai, 2004) (Chao and Knight, 1998;Postle, 2005) generated interference, manipulating the contents of WM toward achieving behavioral goals (Owen et al, 1996;Postle et al, 2006), and maintaining a representation of task rules and/or other information critical for the flexible control of behavior (Miller and Cohen, 2001;Bunge et al, 2003;Hon et al, 2006). Regardless of which of these conceptualizations is to be preferred, an important question for future research will be whether individual differences in WM capacity or some other "trait" might predict which subjects do or do not recruit MFG during performance of delayed-recognition tasks (Rypma et al, 2002).…”

Supplementary Motor Area and Presupplementary Motor Area: Targets of Basal Ganglia and Cerebellar Output

“…However, this does not seem to be the case for the pre-SMA Strick, 1996, 2001;Coull et al, 2004). Indeed, there are a number of instances in which activation was present in the pre-SMA during decidedly nonmotor, cognitive tasks (Petit et al, 1998;Coull et al, 2004;Lau et al, 2004;Pouthas et al, 2005;Hon et al, 2006;Macar et al, 2006).…”

Why rare targets are slow: Evidence that the target probability effect has an attentional locus

“…Sustained activity has been observed in frontoparietal regions throughout periods in which attention is voluntarily deployed (Kastner, Pinsk, De Weerd, Desimone, & Ungerleider, 1999). Furthermore, frontoparietal activity has been observed to increase as attentional demands increase (Culham, Cavanagh, & Kanwisher, 2001;Hon, Epstein, Owen, & Duncan, 2006). Attentional control is said to be exerted when the frontoparietal task representations discussed above influence, via descending (or "top-down") biasing signals, activity in other, related brain systems, such that overall processing converges on what is relevant or attended to (Bressler, Tang, Sylvester, Shulman, & Corbetta, 2008;Kastner et al, 1999;Kastner & Ungerleider, 2000).…”