The Microstructural Border Between the Motor and the Cognitive Domain in the Human Cerebral Cortex

When we voluntarily interact with our environment, the agranular frontal cortex (Brodmann's areas 4 and 6) plays a pivotal role in cortical motor control. The primary motor cortex (area 4) influences kinematic and dynamic parameters of movements, whereas the rostrally adjoining nonprimary motor cortex (area 6) uses external (e.g., sensory) or internal cues to trigger and guide movements. Once thought to be homogeneous, data from nonhuman primates have shown that area 6 is a mosaic of areas, each with distinct structural and functional properties: the supplementary motor areas "SMA proper" and "pre-SMA" on the mesial cortical surface, and the dorso- and ventrolateral premotor cortex on the cortical convexity. Dorso- and ventrolateral premotor areas are specifically connected with posterior parietal areas. These parieto-frontal circuits work in parallel and tranform different aspects of sensory information into appropriate motor commands. The rostral border of area 6 is very important for functional neuroimaging studies in humans since it separates the "motor domain" of the supplementary motor/premotor cortex from the "cognitive domain" of the prefrontal cortex. Can the topography of this border be inferred from the gyral pattern of the frontal lobe? To answer this, ten postmorterm brains were scanned with a T1-weighted magnetic resonance sequence. The brains were serially sectioned at 20 micro M and area 6 was defined by subjective and objective cytoarchitectonic analysis. Each brain's histological volume (with the representation of area 6) was reconstructed in 3-D and spatially normalized to the reference brain of a computerized atlas. The ten normalized volumes were superimposed and a population map was generated that describes, for each voxel, how many brains have a representation of area 6. On the mesial coetical surface, the rostral border of area 6 lies rostral to the anterior commissure-- though the distance varies across different brains. On the lateral convexity, the border recedes in a caudal direction-- again to a varying degree in different brains-- and lies on the precentral gyrus close to the sylvian fissure. No macroanatomical landmark indicates the border between area 6 and the prefrontal cortex. The question whether a motor task engages only the "motor domain" of the supplementary motor/premotor cortex or in addition the "cognitive domain" of the prefrontal cortex can only be answered by superimposing the functional activation map with the microstructural population map of area 6.