Table 3.

Studies Investigating Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortical Functioning During Executive Tasks

Study	Task	Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex
		Group Diff	Neg	Pos	Dis
Menon (2001)	Working Memory	↓ L	0.897	0	0
		↓ R	0.66	0	0
MacDonald (2005)	Context processing	↑ L	0.24	0.17	0.32
		↑ R	0.18	0.03	0.36
		↓ R	0.01	0.06	−0.09
Effect Size			0.38	0.05	0.12
Q - Heterogeneity Statistic (probability value)			3.73 (0.44)	0.06 (0.99)	0.54 (0.97)
Confidence Interval Lower Bound			0.04	−0.35	−0.27
Confidence Interval Upper Bound			0.73	0.45	0.52

Correlation values reported in table (r or rho).

Neg = negative symptom dimension; Pos = positive symptom dimension; Dis = disorganization symptom dimension Group diff = Difference between groups (where there were multiple patient groups this represented patients pooled together or the result of each individual patient group compared to controls); ↑= greater activation in patients compared to controls; ↓ = less activation in patients compared to controls; n.s. = non-significant contrast; L = left; R = right

Note: The direction of the effect size represents whether or not the effect is in a consistent direction with the abnormality compared to controls. A positive effect size represents that abnormal brain activity in patients compared to controls is associated with greater symptom severity (e.g., hypo- and hyperactivity compared to controls is associated with greater symptoms or greater symptoms in the patient group with the symptoms of interest), whereas a negative effect size represents the opposite (e.g., abnormal activity compared to controls is associated with fewer symptoms or the patient group with fewer symptoms of interest).

Symptom dimension information for these studies is presented in Table 2.