Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Research FocusThe role of the inferior frontal junction area in cognitive control
Section snippets
The role of the IFJ in task switching and set shifting
Brain imaging research is sometimes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When a specific brain area has been established to be related to a cognitive process, a multitude of brain imaging studies report activation in the same area. However, closer inspection often reveals either that activations assumed to be located in the area of interest are in fact located in other brain areas, or relevant activations which were not located in the crucial area are ignored. A good example of the latter case is the
IFJ involvement in other cognitive control tasks
One of the oldest and most widely used experimental paradigms to investigate cognitive control is the Stroop task [10]. The Stroop task requires a highly overlearned response – reading – to be inhibited in favour of an unusual response – naming the colour of a word. Again it has been assumed that the fronto-lateral component involved in this task is located in mid-DLPFC. However, in a recent meta-analysis, Neumann and colleagues [7] compared 15 Stroop studies using a new meta-analytic
The IFJ at the junction of three functional neuroanatomical domains
A plausible explanation for the IFJ's lack of recognition in the literature could be that the IFJ is located at the junction of three functional neuroanatomical domains, namely the premotor domain, the language domain and the working memory domain. Although we assume that the IFJ constitutes a functionally and structurally separable area in the fronto-lateral cortex, its functional role might well be to integrate information from these domains. Task representations can be understood as an
Conclusions
Taken together, the findings discussed above provide strong evidence for the assumption that the IFJ constitutes a functionally separable area in the fronto-lateral cortex. Furthermore, this research suggests that the IFJ is involved in the activation of task representations. Future research has to show whether this functional description is general enough to account for the involvement of IFJ in other cognitive domains, like language and memory. Another open issue concerns the interaction of
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