Mental Programs and the Frontal Lobe
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1
MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, United Kingdom
In specific regions of frontal and parietal cortex, neuroimaging shows a pattern of multiple-demand (MD) activity -increased activation associated with many different cognitive demands. In the frontal lobe, MD activity is seen in and around the inferior frontal sulcus, in the frontal operculum/anterior insula, and in the anterior cingulate/supplementary motor area. Similar activity is also seen along the intraparietal sulcus. MD activity is also characteristic of standard tests of “fluid intelligence” or Spearman’s g, and in patients, loss of fluid intelligence is selectively associated with MD lesions.
In any realistic behaviour, goals are achieved by assembling a series of sub-tasks, each separately defined and solved. In this respect, human behaviour resembles the sequential activity of conventional computer programs, assembling a series of operations that together achieves the final goal. Both monkey and human data show that, across the MD system, physiological properties are well suited to construction and control of mental programs. At each stage of a complex activity, there is selective coding of relevant facts, rules and operations, constructing an enclosed representation of the current processing step. Using multivoxel pattern analysis of fMRI data, we show how the form of this representation adapts to processing needs, with greatest focus on demanding operations. For successive stages of the program, neural representations are approximately orthogonal. Orthogonality may be important in maintaining clean separation of successive task steps. The results match classical views (Luria, Shallice and many others) of frontal guidance of sequential behaviour.
In behavioural experiments, fluid intelligence is closely associated with goal neglect, or limits of processing capacity in assembling a new set of task requirements. In fMRI, there is phasic MD activity as each task requirement is learned, and a tonic shift of baseline activity as the overall task model increases in complexity. In large part, fluid intelligence may reflect the function of MD regions in construction and control of new mental programs.
References
1. Sigala et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 2008, 105, 11969-11974.
2. Roca et al. Brain in press, advance access doi:10.1093/brain/awp269.
Conference:
The 20th Annual Rotman Research Institute Conference, The frontal lobes, Toronto, Canada, 22 Mar - 26 Mar, 2010.
Presentation Type:
Oral Presentation
Topic:
Symposium 4: Cognitive Neuroscience
Citation:
Duncan
J
(2010). Mental Programs and the Frontal Lobe.
Conference Abstract:
The 20th Annual Rotman Research Institute Conference, The frontal lobes.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2010.14.00012
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Received:
25 Jun 2010;
Published Online:
25 Jun 2010.
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Correspondence:
John Duncan, MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom, john.duncan@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk