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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on December 1, 2008
Cerebral Cortex 2009 19(8):1929-1936; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhn222
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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.

The Representation of Abstract Task Rules in the Human Prefrontal Cortex

Sara L. Bengtsson1, John-Dylan Haynes2,3, Katsuyuki Sakai4, Mark J. Buckley5 and Richard E. Passingham1,5

1 Wellcome Trust Centre for NeuroImaging, University College London (UCL), 12 Queen Square, London WC1N 3BG, UK, 2 Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Charité-Universitatsmedizin, Berlin, Germany, 3 Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany, 4 Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, 5 Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Address correspondence to email: s.bengtsson{at}fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk.

We have previously reported sustained activation in the ventral prefrontal cortex while participants prepared to perform 1 of 2 tasks as instructed. But there are studies that have reported activation reflecting task rules elsewhere in prefrontal cortex, and this is true in particular when it was left to the participants to decide which rule to obey. The aim of the present experiment was to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to find whether there was activation in common, irrespective of the way that the task rules were established. On each trial, we presented a word after a variable delay, and participants had to decide either whether the word was abstract or concrete or whether it had 2 syllables. The participants either decided before the delay which task they would perform or were instructed by written cues. Comparing the self-generated with the instructed trials, there was early task set activation during the delay in the middle frontal gyrus. On the other hand, a conjunction analysis revealed sustained activation in the ventral prefrontal and polar cortex for both conditions. We argue that the ventral prefrontal cortex is specialized for handling conditional rules regardless of how the task rules were established.

Key Words: decision making • fMRI • free selection • prefrontal cortex • task set


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