Functional organization of the prefrontal cortex

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The prefrontal association cortex is the highest brain center related to perception, memory intelligence, planning, and so on. The cortex is further divided into many areas. We have been examining input-output arrangement of these areas to elucidate functional organization of the frontal cortex.In the present project we investigated the organization of cingulate motor areas inputs to the primate basal ganglia. The cingulate motor areas reside within regions lining the cingulate sulcus and are divided into rostral and caudal parts. Recent studies suggest that the rostral and caudal cingulate motor areas participate in distinct aspects of motor function : The former plays a role in higher-order cognitive control of movements, whereas the latter is more directly involved in their execution. Identified forelimb representations of the rostral and caudal cingulate motor areas were injected with different anterograde tracers, and the distribution patterns of labeled 'terminals were analyzed i … More n the striatum and the subthalamic nucleus. Corticostriatal inputs from the rostral and caudal cingulate motor areas were located within the rostral striatum, with the highest density in the striatal cell bridges or the ventrolateral portions of the putamen, respectively. There was no substantial overlap between these input zones. Similarly, a certain segregation of input zones from the rostral and caudal cingulate motor areas occurred along the mediolateral axis of the subthalamic nucleus. It has also been revealed that corticostriatal and corticosubthalamic input zones from the rostral cingulate motor area considerably overlapped those from the presupplementary motor area, while the input zones from the caudal cingulate motor area displayed a large overlap with those from the primary motor cortex. The present results indicate that a parallel design essentially underlies motor information processing in the cortico-basal ganglia loop derived from the rostral and caudal cingulate motor areas. Less