Functions
Together with BA 44, it comprises Broca's area, a region that is active in semantic tasks, such as semantic decision tasks (determining whether a word represents an abstract or a concrete entity) and generation tasks (generating a verb associated with a noun).
The precise role of BA45 in semantic tasks remains controversial. For some researchers, its role would be to subserve semantic retrieval or semantic working memory processes. Under this view, BA44 and BA45 would together guide recovery of semantic information and evaluate the recovered information with regard to the criterion appropriate to a given context. A slightly modified account of this view is that activation of BA45 is needed only under controlled semantic retrieval, when strong stimulus-stimulus associations are absent. For other researchers, BA45's role is not restricted to semantics per se, but to all activities that require task-relevant representations from among competing representations.
Read more about this topic: Brodmann Area 45
Famous quotes containing the word functions:
“One of the most highly valued functions of used parents these days is to be the villains of their children’s lives, the people the child blames for any shortcomings or disappointments. But if your identity comes from your parents’ failings, then you remain forever a member of the child generation, stuck and unable to move on to an adulthood in which you identify yourself in terms of what you do, not what has been done to you.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“Mark the babe
Not long accustomed to this breathing world;
One that hath barely learned to shape a smile,
Though yet irrational of soul, to grasp
With tiny finger—to let fall a tear;
And, as the heavy cloud of sleep dissolves,
To stretch his limbs, bemocking, as might seem,
The outward functions of intelligent man.”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical body.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)