In favor of a ‘fractionation’ view of ventral parietal cortex: comment on Cabeza et al.

In ‘Cognitive contributions of the ventral parietal cortex: an integrative theoretical account’, Cabeza et al. [1] examine data from manuscripts that explore (i) perceptual/motor reorienting, (ii) episodic memory retrieval, (iii) language, (iv) number processing, (v) theory of mind, and (vi) episodic memory encoding, and conclude that the activity in ventral parietal cortex (VPC) in these studies is ‘largely overlapping with some differences around the edges’. As a result of this purported overlapping activity, a unifying theory (the bottom-up attention – BUA – hypothesis) is proposed.

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