Language-Selective and Domain-General Regions Lie Side by Side within Broca’s Area
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Fedorenko_2012-Language-selective and.pdf
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Author(s)
Duncan, John
Kanwisher, Nancy
Fedorenko, Evelina G.
Date Issued
November 2012
Journal
Current Biology
Publisher
Elsevier
Citation
Fedorenko, Evelina, John Duncan, and Nancy Kanwisher. “Language-Selective and Domain-General Regions Lie Side by Side within Broca’s Area.” Current Biology 22, no. 21 (November 2012): 2059-2062. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
In 1861, Paul Broca stood up before the Anthropological Society of Paris and announced that the left frontal lobe was the seat of speech. Ever since, Broca’s eponymous brain region has served as a primary battleground for one of the central debates in the science of the mind and brain: Is human cognition produced by highly specialized brain regions, each conducting a specific mental process, or instead by more general-purpose brain mechanisms, each broadly engaged in a wide range of cognitive tasks? For Broca’s area, the debate focuses on specialization for language versus domain-general functions such as hierarchical structure building (e.g., [1 and 2]), aspects of action processing (e.g., [3]), working memory (e.g., [4]), or cognitive control (e.g., [5, 6 and 7]). Here, using single-subject fMRI, we find that both ideas are right: Broca’s area contains two sets of subregions lying side by side, one quite specifically engaged in language processing, surrounded by another that is broadly engaged across a wide variety of tasks and content domains.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
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Article is available under a Creative Commons license.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.09.011
