Bedini, M., Olivetti, E., Avesani, P., & Baldauf, D. (2023). Accurate localization and coactivation profiles of the frontal eye field and inferior frontal junction: An ALE and MACM fMRI meta-analysis. Brain Structure and Function, 228(3–4), 997–1017. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-023-02641-y
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Bedini (2023) - Brain Structure
- The frontal eye field (FEF) and the inferior frontal junction (IFJ) are prefrontal structures involved in mediating multiple aspects of goal-driven behavior. Despite being recognized as prominent nodes of the networks underlying spatial attention and oculomotor control, and working memory and cognitive control, respectively, the limited quantitative evidence on their precise localization has considerably impeded the detailed understanding of their structure and connectivity.
- In sum, in the human brain, functional specialization appears to be tightly linked and possibly follows from brain structure, although it remains to be established exactly to what degree this principle holds within specific systems. In the prefrontal cortex (PFC), two lateral structures, the frontal eye field (FEF) and the inferior frontal junction (IFJ) have largely overlapping but complementary roles, being involved in several orchestrating functions such as attention, working memory, cognitive control, and other top-down processes (Baldauf and Desimone 2014; Bedini and Baldauf 2021). In our previous review, we argued that despite these overlaps, it is their patterns of neural selectivity to spatial (FEF) vs non-spatial information (IFJ) that allow the dissociation of their role across these different functions (Bedini and Baldauf 2021)
- To summarize, while the FEF MACM analysis showed that this region is consistently coactivated with the ventrolateral PFC and regions in the posterior parietal cortex across paradigms, the IFJ had more widespread coactivation patterns (particularly in the LH), being more strongly connected with the rest of the PFC and with the insular cortex and claustrum, and possessing a differential connectivity pattern with regions of the inferior temporal cortex.
- In contrast, we found differential coactivations of the LH and RH FEF with the ipsilateral precuneus/ SPL and lateral intraparietal areas. In addition to revealing the task-based functional connectivity fingerprint of these regions, our functional decoding approach also allowed us to uncover the behavioral domains significantly associated with each of them (Fig. 5, right side of each panel; see Supplementary Information p. 23 for a summary of these results).
- The study of the role of the ventrolateral PFC in various cognitive functions such as visual attention, working memory, and cognitive control led to the definition of the IFJ as a separate brain region involved in critical aspects of all these functions (Baldauf and Desimone 2014; Brass et al. 2005; Derrfuss et al. 2005; Zanto et al. 2010)
- The most remarkable differences between FEF and IFJ coactivation patterns were that on the one hand, the LH FEF and RH FEF coactivated with the bilateral ventrolateral PFC (iFEF and IFJ), whereas only the LH IFJ coactivated with the LH FEF in the experiments retrieved. On the other hand, the LH IFJ had stronger and more widespread coactivations in PFC and the insular cortex and was also coactivated with the inferotemporal cortex. These coactivation patterns may be essential for the IFJ to perform its role in feature- and object-based attention tasks
- the MACM contrast between the coactivation patterns of FEF and IFJ fit very well with a recent report of these regions’ functional connectivity in source-reconstructed resting-state MEG data, which showed stronger connectivity of the FEF with the dorsal ‘where’ visual pathway (especially in the alpha and beta bands), and stronger connectivity of the IFJ with the ventral ‘what’ visual pathway (especially in the delta and gamma bands; Soyuhos and Baldauf 2023).
IFJ
- The IFJ, a region found ventrally and anteriorly relative to the iFEF, is typically localized near the junction of the iPCS with the inferior frontal sulcus (IFS), sometimes encroaching into its caudal bank
- IFS and the iPCS that corresponded to the anatomical description of the IFJ in a task-switching paradigm.
- Consistent with this idea, recent high-resolution fMRI studies showed that the IFJ (and in particular, the posterior IFJ as defined according to the MMP1 by Glasser et al. 2016) belongs to the core multipledemand system of the brain
- the bilateral IFJ was always coactivated, we did not find FEF coactivations in the IFJ MACM results, except for the ipsilateral FEF in the LH IFJ MACM analysis.
FEF
- FEF is indeed strongly bound to a macroanatomical location (Paus 1996), and more generally the presence of a strong structure-to-function relationship in this region (see also Wang et al. 2015).
- Interestingly, while these FEF coactivations included as expected medial oculomotor regions (the SCEF) and the SPL/IPL, in both analyses we found coactivated clusters in the bilateral ventral PFC, which included parts of the iFEF and the IFJ based on their localization relative to the iPCS and the IFS. The LH IFJ coactivated with a broad set of other nine clusters (Fig. 5C), and the RH IFJ coactivated with five other clusters (Fig. 5D).
- Converging lines of research suggest that the FEF acts as a spatial priority map (Fiebelkorn and Kastner 2020; Jerde et al. 2012; Sprague and Serences 2013). The localization of the human FEF is, however, highly debated and affected by strong spatial variability (Bedini and Baldauf 2021; Vernet et al. 2014), possibly due to interindividual differences that are obscured when reporting group-level results.
nice to know:
- Glasser et al. (2016) found that the lateral PFC is one of the brain districts where the intrinsic neuroanatomical variability is higher than in the rest of the brain (see also Juch et al. 2005), as measured by a decrease in the test–retest reliability of their multimodal parcellation (MMP1).
- the organization of the regions localized along the banks of the major sulci of the posterior-lateral PFC, namely the SFS, the sPCS, the iPCS, and the IFS, has yet to be clarified spatially.
methods:
- The ALE is a powerful meta-analytic technique that allows for assessing the spatial convergence of the activations reported in the neuroimaging literature (Eickhoff et al. 2012). As a coordinate-based technique, ALE takes as input the activation peaks reported by several independent neuroimaging studies and tests their significance against a null distribution of the foci across the whole brain (Eickhoff et al. 2012).
- for the reasons introduced above, we included in the FEF sample all the studies that investigated the planning and execution of visually guided and voluntary eye movements (prosaccades and antisaccades) as well as covert spatial attention using both blocked and event-related designs
see also
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Created: 2025-11-18 15:45