Ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and tactile memory disambiguation in the human brain

Tactile sensory information is first channeled from the primary somatosensory cortex on the postcentral gyrus to the parietal opercular region (i.e., the secondary somatosensory cortex) and the rostral inferior parietal lobule and, from there, to the prefrontal cortex, with which bidirectional connections exist. Although we know that tactile memory signals can be found in the prefrontal cortex, the contribution of the different prefrontal areas to tactile memory remains unclear. The present functional MRI study shows that a specific part of the prefrontal cortex in the human brain, namely the midventrolateral prefrontal region (cytoarchitectonic areas 47/12 and 45), is involved in active controlled retrieval processing necessary for the disambiguation of vibrotactile information in short-term memory. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this particular part of the prefrontal cortex interacts functionally with the secondary somatosensory areas in the parietal operculum and the rostral inferior parietal lobule during controlled processing for the retrieval of specific tactile information.