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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on February 9, 2005
Cerebral Cortex 2005 15(11):1742-1749; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhi051
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org

Differential Anterior Prefrontal Activation during the Recognition Stage of a Spatial Working Memory Task

H.-C. Leung1, J.C. Gore2 and P.S. Goldman-Rakic3

1 Department of Psychology, State University of New York, at Stony Brook, NY, USA, 2 Institute of Imaging Science, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA and 3 Section of Neurobiology, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA

Address correspondence to Hoi-Chung Leung, SUNY Stony Brook, Department of Psychology, Stony Brook, NY 11794-2500, USA. Email: hoi-chung.leung{at}sunysb.edu.

Neuroimaging studies commonly show widespread activations in the prefrontal cortex during various forms of working memory and long-term memory tasks. However, the anterior prefrontal cortex (aPFC, Brodmann area 10) has been mainly associated with retrieval in episodic memory, and its role in working memory is less clear. We conducted an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging study to examine brain activations in relation to recognition in a spatial delayed-recognition task. Similar to the results from previous findings, several frontal areas were strongly activated during the recognition phase of the task, including the aPFC, the lateral PFC and the anterior cingulate cortex. Although the aPFC was more active during the recognition phase, it was also active during the delay phase of the spatial working memory task. In addition, the aPFC showed greater activity in response to negative probes (non-targets) than to positive probes (targets). While our analyses focused on examining signal changes in the aPFC, other prefrontal regions showed similar effects and none of the areas were more active in response to the positive probes than to the negative probes. Our findings support the conclusion that the aPFC is involved in working memory and particularly in processes that distinguish target and non-target stimuli during recognition.

Key Words: delayed-response • encoding • fMRI • frontopolar • human • retrieval


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