For example, when trying to discriminate a face from a house

under near-threshold conditions of degradation, successful recognition is dependent on FFA activity being greater than baseline and greater than PPA activity. Frontal and parietal mechanisms presumably evaluate the sensory evidence and suppress competing information. In particular, the findings shown in Figures 3A and 3B are consistent with the idea that DLPFC (left superior frontal sulcus) evaluates sensory evidence from posterior sensory areas to make perceptual discrimination decisions for target stimuli degraded with noise; stronger activity was associated with better psychophysical performance (Heekeren et al., 2004). Other regions including IPS and frontal eye field were more active during perceptually check details difficult conditions. Reflection also involves the resolution of interference—competition from representations cued because they share features (e.g., spatial or temporal context, objects or people, perceptual or emotional qualities) with a target event. Examples of retrieval competition include proactive interference, when older memories interfere with the ability to retrieve more recent information (e.g., “Where did I park my car today?”),

or retroactive interference, when newer memories interfere with older ones (e.g., “What was my former address?”) (Wixted, 2004). Resolution of such competition or interference is an act of selective reflective www.selleckchem.com/products/PD-0332991.html attention analogous to perceptual attention (Kuhl et al., 2011 and Heekeren et al., 2004). Patients with frontal lobe damage show greater deficits under conditions of increased mnemonic competition (Shimamura et al., 1995 and Smith et al., 1995). Functional neuroimaging helps to specify the relative roles of different areas of PFC. For example, left ventrolateral PFC is

more active in the face of interference, both during encoding (Dolan et al., 1997 and Fletcher et al., 2000) and retrieval (Badre et al., 2005 and Thompson-Schill et al., 1997). After learning person-location pairs (e.g., “The hippie is in the park”), subsequent retrieval of any unless association (hippie-park, yes/no?) is slower when more facts are associated with the same concept, producing slower response times and greater activity in left VLPFC (BA 44/45) (Sohn et al., 2003). As noted above, left VLPFC is also more active as interference accumulates over trials during working memory tasks and may play a role in overcoming proactive interference (Jonides and Nee, 2006). Retrieval competition in LTM is often studied with an A-B/A-C paradigm. A list of A-B pairs is studied, with the goal of being able later to recall B (target) when A (cue) is presented. Later in the experiment, some of the A cues are paired with new targets (A-C) for new learning.