Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex

2023-10-20:

Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex #

• “Top-Down” Mu-Opioid System Function in Humans: Mu-Opioid Receptors in Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex Mediate the Relationship Between Hedonic Tone and Executive Function in Major Depressive Disorder
• Executive Function, Neural Circuitry, and Genetic Mechanisms in Schizophrenia
  • In line with the theory that VLPFC is recruited in a compensatory fashion during DLPFC-taxing tasks in schizophrenia, patients have shown increased VLPFC activation in conjunction with reduced DLPFC activation during manipulation in a verbal working memory task
  • More recent data examining functional connectivity suggest that this potential compensatory mechanism cannot simply be described as increased relative activation, but rather, increased dominance and assumption of DLPFC’s nodal role in extended executive circuitry
  • When bottom-up sensory inputs are ambiguous or unreliable –as with illusory contours– there is a tendency to give more weight to information from internal models (Parr et al., 2018; Yu, 2014). (I.e via the dlPFC)
    • Under this hypothesis, altering the DLPFC by means of cTBS should highly disrupt metacognition when stimuli are ambiguous