Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex: main functions

The prefrontal lobes represent key elements for the modulation and control of human behavior. Without a doubt, they are fundamental in the integration of cognitive, motivational and emotional information. Their connection with almost all areas of the brain gives them great importance and that is why their study and research is so important. Within the prefrontal lobes we find the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex: an area whose functions are of vital importance for human behavior.

The frontal regions allow us to be autonomous beings, providing us with a good part of the control we have over our lives. All of this through the so-called executive functions, functions that characterize us as human beings. Thanks to these areas we build our identity and develop self-awareness.

In this way, internal dialogue and communication with others is possible. Social cognition takes place in these areas, and empathy arises from there, the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. At the same time, they also enable us to predict the behaviors of others – anticipating their intentions – or understand aspects such as deception.

prefrontal cortex

Frontal lobe anatomy

The frontal lobe is divided into several areas:

Motor, premotor and supplementary area. Frontal ocular field. Broca’s area. Prefrontal cortex.

At the same time it is subdivided into three regions:

Dorsolateral.Orbital.Medial.

Main functions of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

Both Stuss and Knight (2002) and Tirapu and Ustárroz (2012) point out some of the main characteristics of this crust. You can read them below:

Inhibition, coordination and modulation of behavior.Search, recovery and updating of relevant information at all times. Planning, preparation and anticipation through temporal signals.Cognitive and emotional regulation and control.Flexibility to change attention and behavior as conditions change.

Attention

Among the main functions of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is attention control. This control encompasses processes such as task switching, the ability to divide attention, preparation for action, and interference control.

Memory

Regarding memory, we must differentiate between working memory or operational memory and declarative memory. Working or operational memory is a system that allows you to retain and work with information temporarily. Baddeley (2010) states that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex would act as a central executive system. According to the author, it has “lthe ability to retrieve information and keep it active while manipulating it“.

For their part, Stuss and Levine (2002) postulate something different. They say that the participation of this area increases when the information demanded “exceeds the capacity of working memory and when it is necessary to control distractors that may interfere with the relevant information with which one is working”.

Regarding declarative memory, The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex appears to be involved in information retrieval processes. It participates in choosing the best strategies for encoding information and is related to processes associated with source memory. That is, remembering the characteristics of an event: what, how, when and where.

Alterations in source memory affect subjects’ ability to examine the origin of their memories. This process is known as reality monitoring. In this way, they can distinguish between real or imagined events. Baddeley assures that “A deficit in this process may be responsible for the phenomena of proactive interference and the frequent intrusions and confabulations that patients with prefrontal lesions present.“.

Language

Lack of verbal fluency is related to prefrontal lesions, especially those on the left side. At the same time, the narrative discourse would also be affected in terms of its simplification and the omission of grammatical forms when alterations appear in this area.

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex houses the syntactic processing, metaphor understanding, verbal fluency, semantic categorization, sentence generation and verb generation. Any of them can be affected depending on the specific area damaged.

Preparation and temporal sequencing

Other functions of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

As you can imagine, such a complex and modern structure (evolutionarily speaking) is not restricted to the functions mentioned, but rather houses many others that have yet to be investigated so thoroughly:

Error detection and processing. Inferential reasoning. Decision making. Numerical calculation. Attribution of intentionality. Reward circuits. Response to painful thermal stimuli. Regulation of chronic and acute pain. Selective attention to human voices.

As you can see, many small processes in our daily lives are housed in this brain area. It is quite possible that much of human behavior can be deciphered by studying the frontal lobe, but only time and study will tell clearly.

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