Broad domain generality in focal regions of frontal and parietal cortex
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Fedorenko_2013_Broad-domain-generality.pdf
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Author(s)
Fedorenko, Evelina G.
Duncan, John
Kanwisher, Nancy
Date Issued
October 2013
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences (U.S.)
Citation
Fedorenko, E., J. Duncan, and N. Kanwisher. “Broad Domain Generality in Focal Regions of Frontal and Parietal Cortex.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 41 (October 8, 2013): 16616–16621.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Unlike brain regions that respond selectively to specific kinds of information content, a number of frontal and parietal regions are thought to be domain- and process-general: that is, active during a wide variety of demanding cognitive tasks. However, most previous evidence for this functional generality in humans comes from methods that overestimate activation overlap across tasks. Here we present functional MRI evidence from single-subject analyses for broad functional generality of a specific set of brain regions: the same sets of voxels are engaged across tasks ranging from arithmetic to storing information in working memory, to inhibiting irrelevant information. These regions have a specific topography, often lying directly adjacent to domain-specific regions. Thus, in addition to domain-specific brain regions tailored to solve particular problems of longstanding importance to our species, the human brain also contains a set of functionally general regions that plausibly endow us with the cognitive flexibility necessary to solve novel problems.
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 made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1315235110
