similar or different the role of the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex in similarity detection相似或不同的腹外侧前额叶皮层的作用相似度检测.pdfVIP

Similar or Different? The Role of the Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex in Similarity Detection ´ 1,3,4 1 1,2 1,3 Beatrice Garcin *, Emmanuelle Volle , Bruno Dubois , Richard Levy ´ ˆ ` ˆ ´ ˆ ` 1 CR-ICM – UPMC, Inserm UMR_S 975;CNRS UMR 7225, Groupe Hospitalier Pitie-Salpetriere, Paris, France, 2 AP-HP Service de Neurologie, Hopital Pitie-Salpetriere, Paris, ˆ France, 3 AP-HP Service de Neurologie, Hopital Saint-Antoine, Paris, France, 4 Centre de NeuroImagerie de Recherche - CENIR, CR-ICM - UPMC UMR-S975, Inserm U975, ´ ˆ ` CNRS UMR7225, Groupe Hospitalier Pitie-Salpetriere, Paris, France Abstract Patients with frontal lobe syndrome can exhibit two types of abnormal behaviour when asked to place a banana and an orange in a single category: some patients categorize them at a concrete level (e.g., ‘‘both have peel’’), while others continue to look for differences between these objects (e.g., ‘‘one is yellow, the other is orange’’). These observations raise the question of whether abstraction and similarity detection are distinct processes involved in abstract categorization, and that depend on separate areas of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). We designed an original experimental paradigm for a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study involving healthy subjects, confirming the existence of two distinct processes relying on different prefrontal areas, and thus explaining the behavioural dissociation in frontal lesion patients. We showed that: 1) Similarity detec