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There is evidence from neuroimaging that the prefrontal cortex may be involved in establishing task set activity in advance of presentation of the task itself. To find out whether it plays an essential role, we examined patients with unilateral lesions of the rostral prefrontal cortex. They were first instructed as to whether to perform a spatial or a verbal working memory task and then given spatial and verbal items after a delay of 4-12 s. The patients showed an increase in switch costs, making more errors by repeating what they had done on the previous trial. They were able to establish regional task set activity during the instruction delay, as evidenced by sustained changes in the blood oxygenation level-dependent signal in caudal frontal regions. However, in contrast to healthy controls, they were less able to maintain functional connectivity among the surviving task-related brain regions, as evidenced by reduced correlations between them during instruction delays. The results suggest that the left rostral prefrontal cortex is indeed required for establishing a cognitive set but that the essential function is to support the functional connectivity among the task-related regions.

Original publication

DOI

10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2349-07.2007

Type

Journal article

Journal

J Neurosci

Publication Date

28/11/2007

Volume

27

Pages

13303 - 13310

Keywords

Adult, Analysis of Variance, Brain Injuries, Brain Mapping, Cognition, Female, Humans, Image Processing, Computer-Assisted, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Male, Memory, Short-Term, Middle Aged, Neuropsychological Tests, Oxygen, Prefrontal Cortex, Reaction Time, Set (Psychology)