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Functional specialization of areas along the anterior-posterior axis of the primate prefrontal cortex.

ABSTRACT: Functional specialization of areas along the anterior-posterior axis of the lateral prefrontal cortex has been speculated but little evidence exists about distinct neurophysiological properties between prefrontal sub-regions. To address this issue we divided the lateral prefrontal cortex into a posterior-dorsal, a mid-dorsal, an anterior-dorsal, a posterior-ventral, and an anterior ventral region. Selectivity for spatial locations, shapes, and colors was evaluated in six monkeys never trained in working memory tasks, while they viewed the stimuli passively. Recordings from over two thousand neurons revealed systematic differences between anterior and posterior regions. In the dorsal prefrontal cortex, anterior regions exhibited the largest receptive fields, longest response latencies, and lowest amount of information for stimuli. In the ventral prefrontal cortex, posterior regions were characterized by a low percentage of responsive neurons to any stimuli we used, consistent with high specialization for stimulus features. Additionally, spatial information was more prominent in the dorsal and color in ventral regions. Our results provide neurophysiological evidence for a rostral-caudal gradient of stimulus selectivity through the prefrontal cortex, suggesting that posterior areas are selective for stimuli even when these are not releant for execution of a task, and that anterior areas are likely engaged in more abstract operations.

SUBMITTER: Riley MR

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6059101 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Functional specialization of areas along the anterior-posterior axis of the primate prefrontal cortex.

Riley Mitchell R MR Qi Xue-Lian XL Constantinidis Christos C

Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) 20170701 7

Functional specialization of areas along the anterior-posterior axis of the lateral prefrontal cortex has been speculated but little evidence exists about distinct neurophysiological properties between prefrontal sub-regions. To address this issue we divided the lateral prefrontal cortex into a posterior-dorsal, a mid-dorsal, an anterior-dorsal, a posterior-ventral, and an anterior ventral region. Selectivity for spatial locations, shapes, and colors was evaluated in six monkeys never trained in ...[more]

PMID: 27371761

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Project description:While age-related volumetric changes in human hippocampal subfields have been reported, little is known about patterns of subfield functional connectivity (FC) in the context of healthy ageing. Here we investigated age-related changes in patterns of FC down the anterior-posterior axis of each subfield. Using high resolution structural MRI we delineated the dentate gyrus (DG), CA fields (including separating DG from CA3), the subiculum, pre/parasubiculum, and the uncus in healthy young and older adults. We then used high resolution resting state functional MRI to measure FC in each group and to directly compare them. We first examined the FC of each subfield in its entirety, in terms of FC with other subfields and with neighboring cortical regions, namely, entorhinal, perirhinal, posterior parahippocampal, and retrosplenial cortices. Next, we analyzed subfield to subfield FC within different portions along the hippocampal anterior-posterior axis, and FC of each subfield portion with the neighboring cortical regions of interest. In general, the FC of the older adults was similar to that observed in the younger adults. We found that, as in the young group, the older group displayed intrinsic FC between the subfields that aligned with the tri-synaptic circuit but also extended beyond it, and that FC between the subfields and neighboring cortical areas differed markedly along the anterior-posterior axis of each subfield. We observed only one significant difference between the young and older groups. Compared to the young group, the older participants had significantly reduced FC between the anterior CA1-subiculum transition region and the transentorhinal cortex, two brain regions known to be disproportionately affected during the early stages of age-related tau accumulation. Overall, these results contribute to ongoing efforts to characterize human hippocampal subfield connectivity, with implications for understanding hippocampal function and its modulation in the ageing brain.

Project description:Working memory is essential for many of our distinctly human abilities, including reasoning, problem solving, and planning. Research spanning many decades has helped to refine our understanding of this high-level function as comprising several hierarchically organized components, some which maintain information in the conscious mind, and others which manipulate and reorganize this information in useful ways. In the neocortex, these processes are likely implemented by a distributed frontoparietal network, with more posterior regions serving to maintain volatile information, and more anterior regions subserving the manipulation of this information. Recent meta-analytic findings have identified the anterior lateral prefrontal cortex, in particular, as being generally engaged by working memory tasks, while the posterior lateral prefrontal cortex was more strongly associated with the cognitive load required by these tasks. These findings suggest specific roles for these regions in the cognitive control processes underlying working memory. To further characterize these regions, we applied three distinct seed-based methods for determining cortical connectivity. Specifically, we employed meta-analytic connectivity mapping across task-based fMRI experiments, resting-state BOLD correlations, and VBM-based structural covariance. We found a frontoparietal pattern of convergence which strongly resembled the working memory networks identified in previous research. A contrast between anterior and posterior parts of the lateral prefrontal cortex revealed distinct connectivity patterns consistent with the idea of a hierarchical organization of frontoparietal networks. Moreover, we found a distributed network that was anticorrelated with the anterior seed region, which included most of the default mode network and a subcomponent related to social and emotional processing. These findings fit well with the internal attention model of working memory, in which representation of information is processed according to an anteroposterior gradient of abstract-to-concrete representations.

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Functional specialization of areas along the anterior-posterior axis of the primate prefrontal cortex.

Publications

Functional specialization of areas along the anterior-posterior axis of the primate prefrontal cortex.

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