Dissociating the Roles of the Prefrontal Subregions During Long-Term Memory Encoding
-
1
University of California, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute & Department of Psychology, United States
The anatomy of PFC is heterogenous and much effort has been made towards identifying functional subdivisions. Most long-term memory (LTM) encoding studies implicate ventrolateral PFC (VLPFC) but few find evidence that dorsolateral PFC (DLPFC) contributes. One theory suggests VLPFC supports encoding distinct item information and DLPFC, together with VLPFC, contributes to encoding distinct inter-item relationships. Previous neuroimaging studies provided some evidence for this account, but it remains unclear whether the contributions of VLPFC and DLPFC can be separated. Critically, in previous paradigms, distinct item and distinct relational processing co-occur and contribute to subsequent memory. Under such circumstances, it may be difficult to dissociate the regions that support these processes. The present study overcomes this limitation. During scanning, participants were given relational mediators and we varied whether these mediators or items associated with these mediators were processed uniquely or repeatedly. This permitted us to control the distinctiveness of the relational or item information being processed on each trial. After scanning, we examined item and relational memory. Results show a double-dissociation: VLPFC activity correlates specifically with subsequent item memory and DLPFC activity correlates specifically with subsequent distinct relational memory. Thus, we found evidence that the functions of VLPFC and DLPFC are dissociable.
Conference:
The 20th Annual Rotman Research Institute Conference, The frontal lobes, Toronto, Canada, 22 Mar - 26 Mar, 2010.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Cognitive Neuroscience
Citation:
Blumenfeld
R and
D'Esposito
M
(2010). Dissociating the Roles of the Prefrontal Subregions During Long-Term Memory Encoding.
Conference Abstract:
The 20th Annual Rotman Research Institute Conference, The frontal lobes.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2010.14.00096
Copyright:
The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers.
They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters.
The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated.
Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed.
For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions.
Received:
29 Jun 2010;
Published Online:
29 Jun 2010.
*
Correspondence:
R S Blumenfeld, University of California, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute & Department of Psychology, Berkeley, United States, rsblume@berkeley.edu