Delineating cognitive functions with lesion overlap analysis

Jan Gläscher
University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf &
California Institute of Techology

Although fMRI has become the ubiquitous tool for studying the neural basis of cognitive functions, the 
mapping of behavioral impairments to lesions in neurological patients remains a powerful approach in 
the cognitive neuroscientist's toolbox because it offers stronger causal inference and can highlight the 
significance of specific white matter connections for certain cognitive functions. In this talk, I will present 
data from several recent lesion studies investigating diverse cognitive functions such as intellgence, 
cognitive control, and value-based decision making. Sophisticated analysis of a multi-dimensional data 
set revealed distinct, non-overlapping brain regions including white matter tracts associated with specific 
cognitive functions as well as overlapping regions which are recruited by different neuropsychological 
tasks. For instance, we identified unique brain regions in the PFC for different cognitive control tasks like 
the Stroop, Trail-Making, and Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, but a common factor explaining the shared 
variance among these tasks was associated with the ACC. These areas were distinct from more ventral 
PFC regions associated with value-based decision making. In summary, lesion overlap analysis is a 
powerful tool for structure-function mapping that provides much stronger causal inference than 
functional neuroimaging.