Common fronto-parietal activity in attention, memory, and consciousness : shared demands on integration?

• Fronto-parietal activity has been frequently observed in fMRI and PET studies of attention, working memory, and episodic memory retrieval. Several recent fMRI studies have also reported fronto-parietal activity during conscious visual perception. A major goal of this review was to assess the degree of anatomical overlap among activation patterns associated with these four functions. A second goal was to shed light on the possible cognitive relationship of processes that relate to common brain activity across functions. For all reviewed functions we observed a consistent and overlapping pattern of brain activity. The overlap was most pronounced for the bilateral parietal cortex (BA 7 and BA 40; close to the intraparietal sulcus), and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (right BA 9 and left BA 6). The common fronto-parietal activity will be discussed in terms of processes related to integration of distributed representations in the brain.

Keyword

Attention/*physiology

Cognition/physiology

Consciousness/*physiology

Cooperative Behavior

Frontal Lobe/*physiology

Humans

Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Memory/*physiology

Parietal Lobe/*physiology

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

art (subject category)