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Rule-Selection and Action-Selection have a Shared Neuroanatomical Basis in the Human Prefrontal and Parietal Cortex
Authors:
ROWE, J., HUGHES, L., ECKSTEIN, D., and OWEN, A.M.
Reference:
Cerebral Cortex, 18(10), 2275-2285
Year of publication:
2008
CBU number:
6686
Abstract:
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.
