Persistent neuronal activity in human prefrontal cortex links perception and action

“…Our results provide further evidence for this interpretation in the form of the negative correlation between broadband activity and alpha. Furthermore, our findings underscore the utility of the broadband measure: (i) the observation that broadband activity can be used to track task‐engaged sites on a fine temporal scale (see also e.g., Haller et al., 2018), as well as (ii) provide readout of task‐specific information (e.g., conflict type). These observations are all in line with broadband activity being a direct measure of local neuronal activation.…”

“…Alternatively, our data may reflect a distributed representation of distinct types of information across the orbital surface rather than anatomically clustered representations that can be uniquely captured by our multi-electrode ECoG approach. Consistent with this interpretation, distributed activation patterns have been observed in a number of cortical areas in ECoG studies [54, 55].…”

“…Yet other approaches argue that LH frontotemporal activations represent the generating and updating of top-down prediction about the upcoming linguistic input, but that these operations are contextually dependant and not unique to language (Blank & Davis, 2016;Carbajal & Malmierca, 2018;Cope et al, 2017). This view is also in line with evidence that information processing within the prefrontal areas is highly dynamic and task-oriented (Haller et al, 2018;Kim et al, 2017;Yeo et al, 2015). For instance, a meta-analysis of fMRI results by Yeo et al, (2015) showed that the lateral prefrontal cortex is largely functionally flexible, with the LIFG consistently recruited for various language tasks (covert naming, word generation, semantic discrimination), but not routinely linked to passive listening of sentences -a finding that does not square well with the strong domain-specific view of LIFG function that predicts its consistent recruitment for the processing of any grammatically-structured sequence.…”