A Unifying Account of Angular Gyrus Contributions to Episodic and Semantic Cognition

Abstract

The angular gyrus (AG) region of lateral parietal cortex has been implicated in a wide variety of tasks and functions, generating numerous influential theories. However, these theories largely fail to explain why so many apparently distinct cognitive activities implicate common parietal structures. We propose a unifying model, based on a set of central principles, to account for coalescences of cognitive task activations across AG. To illustrate the proposed framework, we show how these principles account for findings from studies of episodic and semantic memory that have independently implicated the same AG regions but thus far been considered from largely domain-specific perspectives. We conclude that AG computations, as part of a wider lateral parietal system, enable the online dynamic buffering of multisensory spatiotemporally extended representations.

Keywords: angular gyrus; cognition; episodic memory; lateral parietal cortex; semantic memory.