title: Common fronto-parietal activity in attention, memory, and consciousness: shared demands on integration?
abstract: Fronto-parietal activity has been frequently observed in fMRI and PET studies of attention, working memory, and episodic memory retrieval. Several recent fMRI studies have also reported fronto-parietal activity during conscious visual perception. A major goal of this review was to assess the degree of anatomical overlap among activation patterns associated with these four functions. A second goal was to shed light on the possible cognitive relationship of processes that relate to common brain activity across functions. For all reviewed functions we observed a consistent and overlapping pattern of brain activity. The overlap was most pronounced for the bilateral parietal cortex (BA 7 and BA 40; close to the intraparietal sulcus), and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (right BA 9 and left BA 6). The common fronto-parietal activity will be discussed in terms of processes related to integration of distributed representations in the brain.
authors.affiliation: Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology Research Center, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Roozbeh Hospital, South Kargar Street, 13185/1741 Tehran, Iran. HamidReza.Naghavi@psy.umu.se
authors.forename: Hamid Reza
authors.initials: HR
authors.lastname: Naghavi
authors.forename: Lars
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Nyberg
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology; D003243:Consciousness / Q000502:physiology*; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D010296:Parietal Lobe / Q000502:physiology*