Nature Neuroscience
2, 11 - 12 (1999)
doi:10.1038/4513
Orbitofrontal cortex is activated during breaches of expectation in tasks
of visual attentionA.C. Nobre1, 2, 3, J.T. Coull2, C.D. Frith2
& M.M. Mesulam31
University of Oxford, Department of Experimental Psychology, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK
2
Functional Imaging Laboratory, Wellcome Department of Cognitive Neurology, Institute of Neurology, 12 Queen Square, London WC1N 3BG, UK
3
Department of Neurology, Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago, Illinois 60611, USA
Correspondence should be addressed to A.C. Nobre anna.nobre@psy.ox.ac.ukAlthough information processing limitations encourage the evolution of
brain systems that extract sameness and repeat established responses, advanced
species have developed complementary neural systems for the rapid detection
of deviations from sameness and for inhibiting inappropriate automatic response
tendencies1. The prefrontal cortex is thought to have a particularly
critical, executive role in detecting deviations from familiar patterns and
inhibiting automatic responses2. Here we used positron−emission
tomography (PET) to demonstrate that prefrontal cortex was activated when
the learned and expected stimulus associations that guide behavior were violated,
requiring inhibition of the prepared response and redirection of the focus
of attention, in variants of a classic task of visual spatial orienting of
attention3.
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