A subsequent-memory effect in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

The importance of brain regions for long-term memory encoding has been examined by comparison of encoding-related neural activity on trials in which successful recollection subsequently occurred to the encoding-related activity on trials in which successful recollection did not occur. We applied similar analyses to event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data to explore the relative roles of dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) regions during specific components of a working-memory (WM) maintenance task. The results of this study indicated that increases in dorsolateral PFC activity during encoding was related to subsequent retrieval-success. These results lend support to the hypothesis that ventrolateral PFC mediates a limited-capacity WM buffer that supports rehearsal maintenance functions while dorsolateral PFC mediates WM organization functions that accommodate the capacity limits of WM maintenance.