Current Biology
Volume 22, Issue 21, 6 November 2012, Pages 2059-2062
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Language-Selective and Domain-General Regions Lie Side by Side within Broca’s Area

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.09.011Get rights and content
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Summary

In 1861, Paul Broca stood up before the Anthropological Society of Paris and announced that the left frontal lobe was the seat of speech. Ever since, Broca’s eponymous brain region has served as a primary battleground for one of the central debates in the science of the mind and brain: Is human cognition produced by highly specialized brain regions, each conducting a specific mental process, or instead by more general-purpose brain mechanisms, each broadly engaged in a wide range of cognitive tasks? For Broca’s area, the debate focuses on specialization for language versus domain-general functions such as hierarchical structure building (e.g., [1, 2]), aspects of action processing (e.g., [3]), working memory (e.g., [4]), or cognitive control (e.g., [5, 6, 7]). Here, using single-subject fMRI, we find that both ideas are right: Broca’s area contains two sets of subregions lying side by side, one quite specifically engaged in language processing, surrounded by another that is broadly engaged across a wide variety of tasks and content domains.

Highlights

► Broca’s area contains both language-selective and domain-general subregions ► “Broca’s aphasia” plausibly results from damage to both sets of subregions ► These data help reconcile competing views of Broca’s area ► Human cognition is produced by both specialized and general-purpose brain regions

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