Is the rostro-caudal axis of the frontal lobe hierarchical?

By David Badre, Mark D'Esposito. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2009

912 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The frontal lobes in the brain are a component of the cerebral system that supports goal-directed behaviour. However, their functional organization remains controversial. Recent studies have reported rostro-caudal distinctions in frontal cortex activity based on the abstractness of action representations. In addition, some have proposed that these differences reflect a hierarchical organization, whereby anterior frontal regions influence processing by posterior frontal regions during the realization of abstract action goals as motor acts. However, few have considered whether the anatomy and physiology of the frontal lobes support such a scheme. To address this gap, this Review surveys anatomical, neuroimaging, electrophysiological and developmental findings, and considers the question: could the organization of the frontal cortex be hierarchical?

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d178abbf8c0cec10371106715f67b4d860e671e9

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Citations in the corpus

The expected value of control: An integrative theory of anterior cingulate cortex function (2013, positive): “Control Hierarchies Several recent studies have proposed that separate regions within the lPFC might encode information pertinent to different levels of task structure, with higher-level processes engaging more anterior regions (Badre and D’Esposito, 2009; Koechlin et al., 2003; though see Crittende”
The Role of Executive Function in Shaping Reinforcement Learning. (2020, background): “Such learning may be supported by hierarchies of representations in prefrontal cortex [55,56].”
Organisation of executive functions: Hemispheric asymmetries (2012, background): “…to highlight functional fractionation in the frontal lobes along the three different axes: rostrocaudal, ventral-dorsal, and right left (e.g., Badre & d’Esposito, 2009; Grafman, Spector, & Rattermann, 2005; Koechlin, Corrado, Pietrini, & Grafman, 2000; Petrides, 2005; Stuss & Alexander,…”
An opportunity cost model of subjective effort and task performance (2013, neutral): “…and on the nature of the information being processed, as well along the anatomical dimensions of left-right, dorsal-ventral, and anterior-posterior (Badre & D’Esposito 2009; Botvinick 2008; Courtney 2004; D’Esposito et al. 2000; Fuster 1997; Koechlin & Hyafil 2007; Petrides 2000; Smith & Jonides…”
Intrinsic architecture underlying the relations among the default, dorsal attention, and frontoparietal control networks of the human brain (2012, positive): “Betweenness-centrality was selected rather than other network centrality measures because of its ability to explicitly detect main interconnector nodes between network and network modules (see Rubinov & Sporns, 2010).”
Large-Scale Gradients in Human Cortical Organization. (2018, neutral): “, [9,10]), they have been proposed to extend to transmodal association areas [8,44,45].”
Mechanisms of hierarchical reinforcement learning in cortico-striatal circuits 2: evidence from fMRI. (2012, background): “When manipulated experimentally, increases in selection demands at systematically higher levels of policy abstraction have been associated with progressively rostral activation in lateral frontal cortex (Badre and D'Esposito 2007; Badre et al. 2009).”
Hierarchical Active Inference: A Theory of Motivated Control (2018, background): “In addition to the control/motivation dichotomy, a second distinction is based on the level of complexity of a contextual representation [17 – 20].”
Functional network organization of the human brain (2011, background): “This organization does not appear consistent with accounts of cognition that posit rostro-caudal gradients or hierarchies across frontal cortex (Badre and D’Esposito, 2009; O’Reilly, 2010).”