Abstract
The goal of the current study was to examine the pattern of anatomical connectivity of the human frontal pole so as to inform theories of function of the frontal pole, perhaps one of the least understood region of the human brain. Rather than simply parcellating the frontal pole into subregions, we focused on examining the brain regions to which the frontal pole is anatomically and functionally connected. While the current findings provided support for previous work suggesting the frontal pole is connected to higher-order sensory association cortex, we found novel evidence suggesting that the frontal pole in humans is connected to posterior visual cortex. Furthermore, we propose a functional framework that incorporates these anatomical connections with existing cognitive theories of the functional organization of the frontal pole. In addition to a previously discussed medial-lateral distinction, we propose a dorsal-ventral gradient based on the information the frontal pole uses to guide behavior. We propose that dorsal regions are connected to other prefrontal regions that process goals and action plans, medial regions are connected to other brain regions that monitor action outcomes and motivate behaviors, and ventral regions connect to regions that process information about stimuli, values, and emotion. By incorporating information across these different levels of information, the frontal pole can effectively guide goal-directed behavior.
Highlights
Neuroanatomy has long provided insights into the functional organization of the human brain, from the distinctions made by Brodmann over 100 years ago [1] to mapping of the visual cortex in the 70s and 80s [2,3,4]
In order to evaluate the clusters from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) data, we examined the standard deviation of the cluster center-of-gravity, following [34]
The connectivity patterns of the different FP clusters suggest a framework for a functional organization of the frontal pole based on three levels of processing: affective, monitoring, and goal-directed processing
Summary
Neuroanatomy has long provided insights into the functional organization of the human brain, from the distinctions made by Brodmann over 100 years ago [1] to mapping of the visual cortex in the 70s and 80s [2,3,4]. Such insights have been made for regions of the frontal lobe of the brain, such as work distinguishing between dorsal and ventral regions of mid-lateral. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript
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