Cascade of neural processing orchestrates cognitive control in human frontal cortex
- Harvard University, United States
- Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Taiwan
- Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, United States
- Harvard Medical School, United States
- Johns Hopkins Medical School, United States
Abstract
Rapid and flexible interpretation of conflicting sensory inputs in the context of current goals is a critical component of cognitive control that is orchestrated by frontal cortex. The relative roles of distinct subregions within frontal cortex are poorly understood. To examine the dynamics underlying cognitive control across frontal regions, we took advantage of the spatiotemporal resolution of intracranial recordings in epilepsy patients while subjects resolved color-word conflict. We observed differential activity preceding the behavioral responses to conflict trials throughout frontal cortex; this activity was correlated with behavioral reaction times. These signals emerged first in anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) before dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), followed by medial frontal cortex (mFC) and then by orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). These results disassociate the frontal subregions based on their dynamics, and suggest a temporal hierarchy for cognitive control in human cortex.
Article and author information
Author details
Ethics
Human subjects: Informed consent, and consent to publish, was obtained for each participant. All procedures were approved by the Institutional Review Boards at each institution (Methods).
Copyright
© 2016, Tang et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 2,302
- views
-
- 549
- downloads
-
- 35
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Citations by DOI
-
- 35
- citations for umbrella DOI https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.12352
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Cascade of neural processing orchestrates cognitive control in human frontal cortex
eLife 5:e12352.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.12352
