Goldman-Rakic P S
Section of Neurobiology, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT 06520-8001, USA.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 1996 Oct 29;351(1346):1445-53. doi: 10.1098/rstb.1996.0129.
The functional architecture of prefrontal cortex is central to our understanding of human mentation and cognitive prowess. This region of the brain is often treated as an undifferentiated structure, on the one hand, or as a mosaic of psychological faculties, on the other. This paper focuses on the working memory processor as a specialization of prefrontal cortex and argues that the different areas within prefrontal cortex represent iterations of this function for different information domains, including spatial cognition, object cognition and additionally, in humans, semantic processing. According to this parallel processing architecture, the 'central executive' could be considered an emergent property of multiple domain-specific processors operating interactively. These processors are specializations of different prefrontal cortical areas, each interconnected both with the domain-relevant long-term storage sites in posterior regions of the cortex and with appropriate output pathways.
前额叶皮层的功能架构是我们理解人类思维和认知能力的核心。一方面，大脑的这个区域常被视为一个未分化的结构；另一方面，又被看作是心理官能的镶嵌组合。本文聚焦于作为前额叶皮层一种特化功能的工作记忆处理器，并认为前额叶皮层内的不同区域代表了该功能针对不同信息领域的迭代，这些领域包括空间认知、物体认知，此外，对于人类而言还包括语义处理。根据这种并行处理架构，“中央执行系统”可被视为多个交互运作的特定领域处理器的一种涌现属性。这些处理器是前额叶皮层不同区域的特化，每个区域都与皮层后部区域中与领域相关的长期存储位点以及适当的输出通路相互连接。
