Sagittal views of the standard MNI brain showing the location of the lesion in each anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) subject. Two subjects (top left) had focal damage primarily confined to the left dorsal ACC (dACC). One (top, third from left) had more extensive injury to the left cingulate and supplementary motor area, with involvement of the corpus callosum. The fourth subject (top right) had suffered bilateral anterior cerebral artery infarction, with extensive damage to medial frontal structures, including medial orbitofrontal cortex, ventral ACC, and fronto-polar areas bilaterally. This subject was included because she appears to have extensive damage to the dACC bilaterally. We reasoned that while any impairment this subject manifested could not necessarily be attributed to dACC damage, intact performance would be strong evidence that the dACC was not necessary for the cognitive processes being examined. An overlap view of the lesions of all 4 subjects is shown beneath (main image): blue indicates areas damaged in a single subject, green in 2, orange 3 and red all 4 subjects. A sketch of the areas activated in a variety of functional neuroimaging experiments using a variety of attention-demanding tasks, as summarized in the meta-analysis of Bush et al (2000), is overlaid for comparison. Circles indicate activations in cognitive tasks, squares activations in tasks with emotional content. See Fellows et al., pp. 788-796.
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