| Abstract No.: | C-D3147 |
| Country: | Canada |
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| Title: | A COMMON MEDIAL FRONTAL CORTICAL NETWORK FOR THE STROOP AND ANTI-SACCADE TASKS BUT NOT FOR THE SUBCORTICAL AREA IN THE PUTAMEN. |
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| Authors/Affiliations: | 3 Shima Ovaysikia*; 1 J.A. Dankert; 2 J.F.X. DeSouza;
1 University of Waterloo, Dept of Psychology; 2 York Center for Vision Research; 3 York University, Dept of Psychology, Toronto, ON, Canada
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| Content: | A medial frontal cortex structure called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is thought to be involved in monitoring response conflicts and/or directing adjustments needed for control of behavior. Ford et al. (2005) showed increased activation in ACC related to anti-saccade errors and during incongruent Stroop tasks, MacDonald et al. (2000) showed increased activity. Objectives: We sought to discover a more precise location of cingulate cortex activation for these two tasks (i.e. anti-saccade and Stroop) with using different neural networks, both of which involve suppression of a natural behavior. One hypothesis states that suppression is a general phenomenon that is not task specific, whereas others have demarcated ACC into distinct areas involved in language and motor behaviors. Methods and Materials: We averaged across subjects to examine the specific anatomical locations with a focus on the frontal cortex using fMRI. The BOLD signal from the activated regions was extracted and explored through ROI analyses. Results: In accordance with the first proposed hypothesis, our analysis shows similar activation of the medial frontal structures (including ACC) for both the Stroop and anti-saccade tasks with the Stroop activation extending more anterior along the medial frontal activation than the anti-saccade activations. Both tasks involved other frontal brain regions; frontal eye fields bilaterally, supplementary eye fields, dorsal and ventral prefrontal cortex and putamen activations. The putamen activation was bilateral for the anti-saccade task but only localized to the left hemisphere for the Stroop task. Although the medial frontal activations were bilateral for both tasks there may be a different subcortical mechanism being used. Conclusion: The involvement of similar anatomical structures in both tasks suggests that analogous processes may be at work, perhaps due to their common suppression of two different automatic behaviours. |
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