What does the retrosplenial cortex do?

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

The past decade has seen a transformation in research on the retrosplenial cortex (RSC). This cortical area has emerged as a key member of a core network of brain regions that underpins a range of cognitive functions, including episodic memory, navigation, imagination and planning for the future. It is now also evident that the RSC is consistently compromised in the most common neurological disorders that impair memory. Here we review advances on multiple fronts, most notably in neuroanatomy, animal studies and neuroimaging, that have highlighted the importance of the RSC for cognition, and consider why specifying its precise functions remains problematic.

Related collections

Most cited references 112

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

Remembering the past and imagining the future: common and distinct neural substrates during event construction and elaboration.

Donna Addis, Alana T. Wong, Daniel Schacter (2007)

People can consciously re-experience past events and pre-experience possible future events. This fMRI study examined the neural regions mediating the construction and elaboration of past and future events. Participants were cued with a noun for 20s and instructed to construct a past or future event within a specified time period (week, year, 5-20 years). Once participants had the event in mind, they made a button press and for the remainder of the 20s elaborated on the event. Importantly, all events generated were episodic and did not differ on a number of phenomenological qualities (detail, emotionality, personal significance, field/observer perspective). Conjunction analyses indicated the left hippocampus was commonly engaged by past and future event construction, along with posterior visuospatial regions, but considerable neural differentiation was also observed during the construction phase. Future events recruited regions involved in prospective thinking and generation processes, specifically right frontopolar cortex and left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, respectively. Furthermore, future event construction uniquely engaged the right hippocampus, possibly as a response to the novelty of these events. In contrast to the construction phase, elaboration was characterized by remarkable overlap in regions comprising the autobiographical memory retrieval network, attributable to the common processes engaged during elaboration, including self-referential processing, contextual and episodic imagery. This striking neural overlap is consistent with findings that amnesic patients exhibit deficits in both past and future thinking, and confirms that the episodic system contributes importantly to imagining the future.

0 comments Cited 428 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

Functional connectivity of default mode network components: correlation, anticorrelation, and causality.

Lucina Q Uddin, A. M. Kelly, Bharat Biswal … (2009)

The default mode network (DMN), based in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), exhibits higher metabolic activity at rest than during performance of externally oriented cognitive tasks. Recent studies have suggested that competitive relationships between the DMN and various task-positive networks involved in task performance are intrinsically represented in the brain in the form of strong negative correlations (anticorrelations) between spontaneous fluctuations in these networks. Most neuroimaging studies characterize the DMN as a homogenous network, thus few have examined the differential contributions of DMN components to such competitive relationships. Here, we examined functional differentiation within the DMN, with an emphasis on understanding competitive relationships between this and other networks. We used a seed correlation approach on resting-state data to assess differences in functional connectivity between these two regions and their anticorrelated networks. While the positively correlated networks for the vmPFC and PCC seeds largely overlapped, the anticorrelated networks for each showed striking differences. Activity in vmPFC negatively predicted activity in parietal visual spatial and temporal attention networks, whereas activity in PCC negatively predicted activity in prefrontal-based motor control circuits. Granger causality analyses suggest that vmPFC and PCC exert greater influence on their anticorrelated networks than the other way around, suggesting that these two default mode nodes may directly modulate activity in task-positive networks. Thus, the two major nodes comprising the DMN are differentiated with respect to the specific brain systems with which they interact, suggesting greater heterogeneity within this network than is commonly appreciated.

0 comments Cited 379 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

Parietal lobe contributions to episodic memory retrieval.

Anthony D. Wagner, Benjamin J Shannon, Itamar Kahn … (2005)

Although the parietal lobe is not traditionally thought to support declarative memory, recent event-related fMRI studies of episodic retrieval have consistently revealed a range of memory-related influences on activation in lateral posterior parietal cortex (PPC) and precuneus extending into posterior cingulate and retrosplenial cortex. This article surveys the fMRI literature on PPC activation during remembering, a literature that complements earlier electroencephalography data. We consider these recent memory-related fMRI responses within the context of classical ideas about parietal function that emphasize space-based attention and motor intention. We conclude by proposing three hypotheses concerning how parietal cortex might contribute to memory.