Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2008 Apr;18(4):904-14.
doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhm123. Epub 2007 Aug 3.

Role of prefrontal and parietal cortices in associative learning

John R Anderson  1 , Dana Byrne, Jon M Fincham, Pat Gunn
Affiliations

Role of prefrontal and parietal cortices in associative learning

John R Anderson et al. Cereb Cortex. 2008 Apr.

Abstract

Two studies were performed that compared a "Paired" condition in which participants studied paired associates with a "Generated" condition in which participants completed word fragments to produce paired associates. In both tasks, participants were responsible for memory of the material either studied or generated. The experiments revealed significant differences between the responses of a predefined prefrontal region and a predefined parietal region. The parietal region responded more in the Generated condition than the Paired condition, whereas there was no difference in the prefrontal region. On the other hand, the prefrontal region responded to the delay between study and test in both the Paired and Generated conditions, whereas the parietal region only responded to delay in the Generated condition. This pattern of results is consistent with the hypothesis that the parietal region is responsive to changes in problem representation and the prefrontal region to retrieval operations. An information-processing model embodying these assumptions was fit to the blood oxygen level-dependent responses in these regions.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of Interest: None declared.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
A comparison of the procedures in the Paired and Generated conditions.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Behavioral results from Experiment 1: (a) Probability of correct recall; (b) Latency of correct recall.
Figure 3
Figure 3
fMRI results from Experiment 1: (a) BOLD response in the predefined posterior parietal region; (b) BOLD response in the predefined prefrontal region.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Behavioral results from Experiment 2: (a) Probability of correct recall; (b) Latency of correct recall.
Figure 5
Figure 5
fMRI results from Experiment 2: (a) BOLD response in the predefined posterior parietal region; (b) BOLD response in the predefined prefrontal region.
Figure 6
Figure 6
A representation of the sequence of module activity in different conditions of the experiment. Blue denotes activity in the visual module, green in the imaginal (parietal) module, red in the declarative retrieval (prefrontal) module, and yellow in the manual module. The retrieval boxes and delays between activity are not drawn to scale.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Predictions of the model for latencies and observed latencies, averaging over the 2 experiments.
Figure 8
Figure 8
Predictions of the information-processing model for parietal and prefrontal regions of interest for the 2 experiments. Dotted lines connect the data points and solid lines are the predictions of the model.
Figure 9
Figure 9
Response in the prefrontal region for each delay condition. Dotted lines connect the data points and solid lines are the predictions of the model.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Alivisatos B, Petrides M. Functional activation of the human brain during mental rotation. Neuropsychologia. 1997;35:111–118. - PubMed
    1. Anderson JR. Human symbol manipulation within an integrated cognitive architecture. Cogn Sci. 2005;29:313–342. - PubMed
    1. Anderson JR, Bothell D, Byrne MD, Douglass S, Lebiere C, Qin Y. An integrated theory of mind. Psychol Rev. 2004;111:1036–1060. - PubMed
    1. Anderson JR, Qin Y, Stenger VA, Carter CS. The relationship of three cortical regions to an information-processing model. J Cogn Neurosci. 2004;16:637–653. - PubMed
    1. Anderson JR, Qin Y, Yung K-J, Carter CS. Information-processing modules and their relative modality specificity. Cogn Psychol. 2007;54:185–217. - PubMed

Publication types