Figure 1.

Anatomy of Cingulate Cortex

(A) Location of the different regions of the cingulate cortex in the macaque (left) and human (right) brain. Regions in blue comprise the ACC gyrus, red lie in the sulcus (although they may also lie within the adjacent paracingulate gyrus and paracingulate sulcus when they are present). Note that these representative drawings are based on a composite of cytoarchitectonic atlases of the cingulate. The border between areas 24a/b has no gross anatomical landmark and also varies considerably between individuals (Vogt, 2009). Regions in green correspond to those typically referred to as dmPFC. Regions in dark blue are sometimes referred to as part of the vmPFC. Image taken from Rushworth et al. (2004).

(B) Connectivity-based parcellation of the medial prefrontal cortex including ACCg (Neubert et al., 2015). The ACC gyrus regions 24a/b and 32pl are shown in light green and maroon, respectively. A distinction between 24a/b and 24a’/b, proposed on the basis of cytoarchitectonic criteria by Vogt (2009) is not always recognized. It was not possible to detect reliable differences between the connectivity profiles of these regions. The green box shows the resting connectivity strength of area 24a/b to other brain areas in both the human (top left: lateral surface; bottom left: medial wall) and macaque (top right: lateral surface; bottom right: medial wall) brain. The central spider plot shows the relative strength of connections between 24a/b and other brain areas in humans (red) and macaques (blue). The maroon box shows the same information for area 32pl.

(C) A representative schematic of the connections of the ACCg. The arrows highlight the key systems the ACCg connects to and their putative roles in social cognition. The ACCg (areas 24a/b and 32pl) is connected to a broad set of regions engaged in reward processing, decision making, and social information processing, making it well placed to form part of a distributed network engaged in computing information about the reward-based behavior of others. Abbreviations: VTA, ventral tegmental area; hypoth, hypothalamus; hippoc, hippocampus; amygd/amy, amygdala; pallid, pallidum; Caud, caudate; ventrStr, ventral striatum; temPol, temporal pole; rsplC, retrosplenial cortex; PCC, posterior cingulate cortex; pIPL, posterior inferior parietal lobule; pIPS, posterior intraparietal sulcus; aIPS, anterior intraparietal sulcus; ParOP, parietal operculum; S1, primary somatosensory cortex; M1, primary motor cortex; SMA, supplementary motor area; stria, striatum.