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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on January 29, 2008
Cerebral Cortex 2008 18(10):2275-2285; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhm249
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© 2008 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Rule-Selection and Action-Selection have a Shared Neuroanatomical Basis in the Human Prefrontal and Parietal Cortex

J. Rowe1,2,3, L. Hughes1,2, D. Eckstein1,2 and A.M. Owen2,3

1 Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Cambridge University, Cambridge CB2 2QQ, UK, 2 Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge CB2 7EF, UK, 3 Medical Research Council Behavioural and Clinical Neurosciences Institute, Cambridge CB2 2EB, UK

Address correspondence to Dr James Rowe, Neurology Unit, Box 165, Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge University Hospitals Trust, Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 2QQ, UK. Email: James.rowe{at}mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk.

The human capacity for voluntary action is one of the major contributors to our success as a species. In addition to choosing actions themselves, we can also voluntarily choose behavioral codes or sets of rules that can guide future responses to events. Such rules have been proposed to be superordinate to actions in a cognitive hierarchy and mediated by distinct brain regions. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to study novel tasks of rule-based and voluntary action. We show that the voluntary selection of rules to govern future responses to events is associated with activation of similar regions of prefrontal and parietal cortex as the voluntary selection of an action itself. The results are discussed in terms of hierarchical models and the adaptive coding potential of prefrontal neurons and their contribution to a global workspace for nonautomatic tasks. These tasks include the choices we make about our behavior.

Key Words: action • adaptive coding • fMRI • prefrontal cortex • rule • selection


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