Lateral frontal pole and relational processing: Activation patterns and connectivity profile

Abstract

The functional contribution of the lateral frontal cortex to behavior has been discussed with reference to several higher-order cognitive domains. In a separate line of research, recent studies have focused on the anatomical organization of this part of the brain. These different approaches are rarely combined. Here, we combine previous work using anatomical connectivity that identified a lateral subdivision of the human frontal pole and work that suggested a general role for rostrolateral prefrontal cortex in processing higher-order relations, irrespective of the type of information. We asked healthy human volunteers to judge the relationship between pairs of stimuli, a task previously suggested to engage the lateral frontal pole. Presenting both shape and face stimuli, we indeed observed overlapping activation of the lateral prefrontal cortex when subjects judged relations between pairs. Using resting state functional MRI, we confirmed that the activated region's whole-brain connectivity most strongly resembles that of the lateral frontal pole. Using diffusion MRI, we showed that the pattern of connections of this region with the main association fibers again is most similar to that of the lateral frontal pole, consistent with the observation that it is this anatomical region that is involved in relational processing.

Primate homologs of mouse cortico-striatal circuits

“…The fact that the unassigned striatal voxels predominantly show connectivity with these areas suggests the presence of a unique cortical-striatal loop. Based on our findings, this loop would be mostly involved in higher-order human behaviours, as are associated with FPl (Hartogsveld et al, 2018; Vendetti and Bunge, 2014), suggesting that these might be difficult to study using the translational paradigm.…”

Human lateral Frontal Pole contributes to control over social-emotional action

“…Images in the social task consisted of faces that differed on the dimensions age and ethnicity. These conditions are both described in detail in Hartogsveld et al (2017) and depicted in figure 4A. This paradigm has been shown to elicit activity in the rostrolateral prefrontal cortex (Vendetti and Bunge 2014) and a recent study (Hartogsveld et al 2017) has shown that this area is the same as the FPl identified by Neubert et al (2014).…”

“…B) This panel shows the (lack of) conjunction of the congruency effect in the AA task (red); the non-social relational reasoning (RR) effect during the task developed by Vendetti and Bunge (2014) (green); and the conjunction between the two (blue). C) This panel shows the conjunction of the congruency effect in the AA task (red); the social relational-reasoning effect during the task developed by Hartogsveld et al, (2017) (green); and the conjunction between the two (blue). For both tasks there is some overlap of effects in Area 46, but only a few voxels in FPl.…”

“…Images were spatially smoothed using a Gaussian 5 mm kernel and low passed filtered with a cut-off at 100 s. Independent component analysis was run (Beckmann and Smith 2004), after which the first 10 components were manually inspected to remove sources of noise (Griffanti et al 2017). Preprocessing for the higher-order relational reasoning task consisted of a similar procedure, which is described in detail in Hartogsveld et al (2017).…”

“…The aPFC has been involved in a disparate range of cognitive tasks [e.g. relational reasoning (Vendetti and Bunge 2014; Hartogsveld et al 2017), counterfactual choice (Boorman et al 2009a; Mansouri et al 2017), exploration behaviour (Daw et al 2006; Zajkowski et al 2017)]. Yet, to date, emotional regulation has not been considered part of the cognitive fingerprint of this region (Koch et al 2018).…”