Identifying functional subdivisions in the medial frontal cortex

Abstract

[Excerpt] The medial frontal cortex (MFC) is thought to be involved in numerous sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective processes. This region is commonly divided into separate subregions, including the anterior cingulate cortex, supplementary motor area (SMA), and the pre-SMA, orbitofrontal cortex, and anterior frontal poles (Amodio and Frith, 2006). The activity of the MFC is highly heterogeneous. Activation of the MFC is reported in many fMRI studies, and it is associated with a variety of processes, including action monitoring (Bonini et al., 2014), response conflict (Gehring and Fencsik, 2001), reward (Taylor et al., 2006), and decision-making (Kahnt et al., 2011). This creates uncertainty in the identification of specific psychological states associated with patterns of activity in the MFC, referred as the reverse inference problem. (...)