Abstract
The ability to maintain and manipulate information across temporal delays is a fundamental requirement to bridge the gap between perception and action. In the case of higher-order behavior, the maintenance of rules and strategies is particularly helpful in bridging this gap. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) has long been considered critical for such processes, and research has focused on different subdivisions of PFC to gain an insight into their diverse contributions to these mechanisms. Substantial evidence indicates that dorsolateral PFC (dlPFC) is an important structure for maintaining information across delays, with cells actively firing across delays and lesions to this region causing deficits in tasks involving delayed responses and maintenance of rules online. Frontopolar cortex (FP), on the other hand, appears to show the opposite pattern of results, with cells not firing across delays and lesions to this region not affecting the same rule-based, delayed response tasks that are impaired following dlPFC lesions. The body of evidence therefore suggests that dlPFC and FP’s contributions to working memory differ. In this article, we will provide a perspective on how these regions might implement distinct but complementary and interactive functions that contribute to more general temporally-extended processes and support flexible, dynamic behavior.
Highlights
The ability to maintain and manipulate information across temporal delays is a fundamental requirement to bridge the gap between perception and action
Human neuroimaging studies have shown that a region anteriorly adjacent to dorsolateral PFC (dlPFC), namely frontopolar cortex (FP), approximately corresponding to Brodmann’s area 10 (Figures 1A–E), is active during working memory and episodic memory tasks in humans (Gilbert et al, 2006a,b) and it has been associated with prospective memory (PM) functions, i.e., the maintenance of information related to a future action plan across time-delays (Okuda et al, 2007; Burgess et al, 2011; Volle et al, 2011)
While no recordings of Frontopolar cortex (FP) cells during DMS/DNMS task exist to date, we recently investigated the effects of targeted lesions to the macaque’s FP on both tasks, and found that, unlike dlPFC lesions, these had no effect on any aspect of the animals’ performance of either task (Figure 2A)
Summary
In tasks of recognition memory such as delay-matching-tosample (DMS) or delay-non-matching-to-sample (DNMS), the subject has to maintain a memory trace of the perceptual features of a sample stimulus, in order to accurately compare them with those of a test stimulus (or stimuli) after delays of varying length. The FP animals were undistinguishable from controls both in reaching criterion for the tasks and in their performance across varying delays (Boschin et al, 2015). This suggests that, despite its activation during working memory tasks, FP is not essential to support the maintenance of visual information across delays, nor for guiding choice behavior based on the type of visual information and rules that underpin DMS/DNMS tasks
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