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Association Areas of the Cortex

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Association areas are regions of the cerebral cortex that do not have a specific sensory or motor function. Instead, they integrate and interpret information from various sources to enable higher cognitive processes such as memory, learning, and decision-making. Some key association areas include the following:
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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Feb 28, 2026

Author Spotlight: Insights into Visual Cortex Research Through Wide-View fMRI Mapping

Author Spotlight: Insights into Visual Cortex Research Through Wide-View fMRI Mapping

Published on: December 8, 2023

Visual field map clusters in human frontoparietal cortex.

Wayne E Mackey¹, Jonathan Winawer^1,2, Clayton E Curtis^1,2

¹Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, United States.

|June 20, 2017

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Researchers mapped human frontoparietal cortex, discovering visual field representations organized in clusters, similar to visual cortex. This finding suggests a potential link between sensory processing and higher-order cognitive functions.

Keywords:

attention fMRI frontal human neuroscience parietal population receptive field topography

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Published on: October 24, 2012

Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Cognitive Neuroscience
Human Brain Mapping

Background:

Visual neurosciences have advanced by mapping sensory inputs to visual areas.
Parcellating higher-order cortex using similar methods has been challenging.
Frontoparietal cortex is typically associated with higher-order cognitive functions, not direct sensory processing.

Purpose of the Study:

To map and characterize the topographic organization of human frontoparietal cortex.
To investigate whether frontoparietal cortex exhibits spatial organization similar to sensory cortex.
To identify reliable anatomical units for future frontoparietal cortex research.

Main Methods:

Utilized a novel experimental task.
Employed nonlinear population receptive field modeling.
Mapped representations of polar angle and eccentricity in frontoparietal regions.

Main Results:

Discovered clustered representations of polar angle and eccentricity in frontoparietal cortex.
Identified multiple gradients of polar angle sharing a confluent fovea, analogous to visual cortex organization.
Demonstrated that these visual maps form well-defined anatomical units.

Conclusions:

Frontoparietal cortex contains spatially organized visual maps, challenging previous assumptions about its function.
This topographic organization may facilitate an efficient interface between perception and cognition.
The identified visual maps provide reliable targets for future studies on frontoparietal cortex.