Dissociation in prefrontal cortex of affective and attentional shifts
- 1 March 1996
- journal article
- Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC in Nature
- Vol. 380 (6569), 69-72
- https://doi.org/10.1038/380069a0
Abstract
The prefrontal cortex is implicated in such human characteristics as volition, planning, abstract reasoning and affect. Frontal-lobe damage can cause disinhibition such that the behaviour of a subject is guided by previously acquired responses that are inappropriate to the current situation. Here we demonstrate that disinhibition, or a loss of inhibitory control, can be selective for particular cognitive functions and that different regions of the prefrontal cortex provide inhibitory control in different aspects of cognitive processing. Thus, whereas damage to the lateral prefrontal cortex (Brodmann's area 9) in monkeys causes a loss of inhibitory control in attentional selection, damage to the orbito-frontal cortex in monkeys causes a loss of inhibitory control in 'affective' processing, thereby impairing the ability to alter behaviour in response to fluctuations in the emotional significance of stimuli. These findings not only support the view that the prefrontal cortex has multiple functions, but also provide evidence for the distribution of different cognitive functions within specific regions of prefrontal cortex.Keywords
This publication has 10 references indexed in Scilit:
- 6-Hydroxydopamine lesions of the prefrontal cortex in monkeys enhance performance on an analog of the Wisconsin Card Sort Test: possible interactions with subcortical dopamineJournal of Neuroscience, 1994
- The Frontal Lobes and Voluntary ActionPublished by Oxford University Press (OUP) ,1993
- Contrasting mechanisms of impaired attentional set-shifting in patients with frontal lobe damage or Parkinson's diseaseBrain, 1993
- Dissociation of Object and Spatial Processing Domains in Primate Prefrontal CortexScience, 1993
- Monitoring of selections of visual stimuli and the primate frontal cortexProceedings Of The Royal Society B-Biological Sciences, 1991
- Myelo‐ and cytoarchitecture of the granular frontal cortex and surrounding regions in the strepsirhine primate Galago and the anthropoid primate MacacaJournal of Comparative Neurology, 1991
- The Allocation of Processing Resources: Higher-Level ControlPublished by Cambridge University Press (CUP) ,1988
- The problem of the frontal lobe: A reinterpretationJournal of Psychiatric Research, 1971
- Perseverative interference in monkeys following selective lesions of the inferior prefrontal convexityExperimental Brain Research, 1970
- Effects of Different Brain Lesions on Card SortingArchives of Neurology, 1963