Anterior prefrontal cortex and the recollection of contextual information

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2005.02.004Get rights and content

Abstract

Recollective memory can involve the retrieval of many different kinds of contextual information, including where and when an event took place, as well as our thoughts and feelings at the time. The brain regions associated with this ability were examined in an event-related fMRI experiment, where participants made decisions about words or famous faces which were presented either on the left or right of a monitor screen. Subsequently, the studied words and faces were again presented and participants underwent fMRI brain scanning while recollecting either which of the decisions they had made on each item (“task memory”), or whether it had been presented on the left or right of the screen (“position memory”). A functional dissociation was observed within anterior prefrontal cortex (principally Brodmann's area 10), with activation in lateral regions associated with remembering either type of information (relative to baseline), and a medial anterior PFC region showing significantly greater activation during the “task memory” conditions. These results suggest different roles for lateral and medial anterior prefrontal cortex in recollection.

Section snippets

Participants

Sixteen right-handed native speakers of English (6 male, 10 female), with normal or corrected-to-normal vision, took part in the experiment. The volunteers (mean age = 22.8 years, range 19–28) were screened using a comprehensive medical questionnaire and informed consent was obtained in a manner approved by the Addenbrooke's NHS Trust Local Research Ethics Committee.

Design and materials

Participants were administered a study phase and a test phase. The study phase was undertaken prior to going into the MRI scanner,

Behavioural results

Recollection accuracy and reaction time data are displayed in Table 1. Importantly, given that the primary hypothesis in the present experiment concerns the contrast between task and position memory, there was no effect of the type of contextual detail on recollection accuracy, F(1, 15) = 0.03, n.s. There was a significant effect of stimulus type with context information related to faces recollected to a greater extent than that for words, F(1, 15) = 26.1, p < 0.001, and a significant interaction

Discussion

The principal finding of the present experiment is that the recollection of different kinds of contextual information is associated with differential recruitment of anterior PFC. This result provides empirical confirmation of a hypothesis that emerged qualitatively on the basis of discrepant results in a series of functional neuroimaging studies (Burgess et al., 2001, Cansino et al., 2002, Dobbins et al., 2002; Henson, Shallice, et al., 1999; Kahn et al., 2004, Nyberg et al., 1996, Ranganath et

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Kalina Christoff, Rik Henson, and Sam Gilbert for valuable comments and advice, and the staff of the Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre. This work was supported by Wellcome Trust grant 061171.

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