12. Prefrontal cortical activation during word-associative, face-associative, and word-face-associative encoding

We report a fMRI study of associative encoding. Subjects studied blocks of word pairs, face pairs, and word-face pairs under two encoding instructions, which either involved judgments about the individual items comprising the pairs or required subjects to associate the items. Comparisons between these two encoding conditions revealed the following. First, consistent with HERA, for both face pairs and word pairs there was a large overlapping region of activation which was left lateralized, with little evidence of material specificity. Second, this activation involved principally Brodmann areas 8 and 9, a region more dorsal than those previously reported. Third, the activation pattern for encoding associations between different kinds of items, word-face pairs, was different from the first pattern and involved bilateral anterior portions of area 47. © 2001 Academic Press.