Figure 1.

Heuristic illustrating a lateral view of the localization of five basic neurocognitive systems, defined anatomically based on the cognitive performance of patients with lesions in specific regions and activation in brain regions during specific cognitive tasks in healthy subjects (for further description of the rationale see Refs [16–18]). The five systems are: (1) the `Left perisylvian/Language' system, a complex, distributed system predominantly located in the temporal and frontal areas of the left hemisphere that surround the Sylvian fissure, which encompasses semantic, syntactic and phonological aspects of language; (2) the `Prefrontal/Executive' system, including the Lateral prefrontal/Working memory system that enables us to hold information `on line' to maintain it over an interval and manipulate it, the Anterior cingulate/Cognitive control system that is required when we must resist the most routine or easily available response in favor of a more task-appropriate response and the Ventromedial prefrontal/Reward processing system, which is responsible for regulating our responses in the face of rewarding stimuli; (3) the `Medial temporal/Memory' system (towards the interior of the brain from the visible surface of the temporal lobe depicted here), responsible for one-trial learning, the ability to retain a representation of a stimulus after a single exposure; (4) the `Parietal/Spatial cognition' system, underlying our ability to mentally represent and manipulate the spatial relations among objects and (5) the `Occipitotemporal/Visual cognition' system, responsible for pattern recognition and visual mental imagery, translating image format visual representations into more abstract representations of object shape and identity, and reciprocally translating visual memory knowledge into image format representations.