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Contributed by Nancy Kanwisher, August 21, 2013 (sent for review July 26, 2013)
Significance
One of the oldest debates in cognitive neuroscience concerns the degree of functional specialization present in the human brain. Prior work has discovered several highly specialized components dedicated to particular mental functions, like face recognition or motion perception. However, our cognitive versatility suggests the additional existence of more general-purpose machinery. Building on prior neuroimaging evidence, along with neurophysiological evidence from non-human primates, we searched for such domain-general brain regions in humans. Seven diverse demanding cognitive tasks produced overlapping activation at the individual-subject level in a number of frontal and parietal brain regions. Thus, human cognition arises from hardware that includes not only specialized components, but also very general-purpose ones that plausibly enable us to solve novel problems.
Abstract
Unlike brain regions that respond selectively to specific kinds of information content, a number of frontal and parietal regions are thought to be domain- and process-general: that is, active during a wide variety of demanding cognitive tasks. However, most previous evidence for this functional generality in humans comes from methods that overestimate activation overlap across tasks. Here we present functional MRI evidence from single-subject analyses for broad functional generality of a specific set of brain regions: the same sets of voxels are engaged across tasks ranging from arithmetic to storing information in working memory, to inhibiting irrelevant information. These regions have a specific topography, often lying directly adjacent to domain-specific regions. Thus, in addition to domain-specific brain regions tailored to solve particular problems of longstanding importance to our species, the human brain also contains a set of functionally general regions that plausibly endow us with the cognitive flexibility necessary to solve novel problems.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence may be addressed. E-mail: evelina9{at}mit.edu, john.duncan{at}mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk, or ngk{at}mit.edu.
Author contributions: E.F., J.D., and N.K. designed research; E.F. performed research; E.F. analyzed data; and E.F., J.D., and N.K. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1315235110/-/DCSupplemental.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
Domain-general regions in the human brain
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