I am using meta-analysis usually to find the peak voxel for the region I'm interested in. One way would be to look up for the functions of the sub-region of PFC and find the coordinates of that sub-region in a meta-analysis. They have quite diverse functions and that depends on the psychological functions you are investigating. The other way would be to map them to the Brodmann areas and mention the numbers. Although that might not be easily understandable for your readers either. Note that I am talking about human PFC. Hope that helps!

Hi Stephanie,

Prefrontal cortex was originally defined based on the projections of the thalamic mediodorsal nucleus. When you see references to the medial PFC it generally refers to the infralimbic, prelimbic and anterior cingulate cortices, while lateral PFC generally refers to various parts of the insular cortex including the granular (visceral), dysgranular (gustatory), and agranular (associative) parts. Orbital or orbitofrontal, cortex has four parts (medial, lateral, ventrolateral, and ventral) and is usually considered separately from PFC.

For a discussion of the various parts and their location in rat and monkey, see:

• Uylings HB, Groenewegen HJ, Kolb B. 2003. Do rats have a prefrontal cortex? Behav Brain Res 146: 3-17

For cytoarchitectural definitions in the rat, see:

• Krettek JE, Price JL. 1977. The cortical projections of the mediodorsal nucleus and adjacent thalamic nuclei in the rat. J Comp Neurol 171: 157-92
• Cechetto DF, Saper CB. 1987. Evidence for a viscerotopic sensory representation in the cortex and thalamus in the rat. J Comp Neurol 262: 27-45
• Allen GV, Saper CB, Hurley KM, Cechetto DF. 1991. Organization of visceral and limbic connections in the insular cortex of the rat. J Comp Neurol 311: 1-16

And to anticipate your next question about how visceral sensory and motor areas are involved in cognitive function, you may want to check out:

• Craig AD. 2002. How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 3: 655-66
• Saper CB. 1996. Role of the cerebral cortex and striatum in emotional motor response. Prog Brain Res 107: 537-50
• Nieuwenhuys R. 1996. The greater limbic system, the emotional motor system and the brain. Progress in brain research 107: 551-80 (and Neuwenhuys is at Nijmegen, if I'm not mistaken)

Hope this helps,

Rick

Do you mean something like the standardized atlases described in this link?

http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1001065

Do you mean human or rodent prefrontal cortex?

Thank you all for your help. I was actually looking for a human brain 'atlas'. I need the information for a review, so unfortunately mapping my results to a brain area doesn't really apply for me as I am mainly looking for a way how to understand other peoples findings, whenever they mention a brain area.

So to rephrase my question: if someone for example refers to 'the medial PFC of the human brain', how do I know exactly where this is (and the same for other PFC regions)?

Hi Stephanie,

What exactly are you asking? One answer would be: well, the 'exact location' is: 'the medial part of PFC' :-) But you look for some kind of 'objective coordinates' I suppose. Let's compare it to a location on Earth. What is the exact location of Nijmegen? People who know about it would say it is somewhere between Arnhem and Venlo. To be more precise you might say it's between Lent and Cuijk, just south of the Waal and north of the Maas. The only thing 'more precise' would be to use a coordinate system (degrees longitude/latitude relative to a defined zero-zero). I guess there's different kinds of coordinate systems for brains, I remember Talairach being one (see link). Perhaps the software of your brain-scan analyses software has some built-in options, and there's bound to be projects like the mouse-brain for human brains as well?

The main problem however is that though we have one earth we have many many brains. And they are all different in size and proportions. And they grow from childhood to adulthood. You can artificially map brain scans to Tailairach but that means you're squeezing and pulling a brain to fit some 'standard form' that in reality it is not. So in the end to say 'somewhere between Lent and Cuijk' (i.e. to say 'the medial part of PFC' or as Rick explained the 'the infralimbic, prelimbic and anterior cingulate cortices') is about as precise as you can get in a way that makes sense.

But maybe you are trying to get at something else altogether..

Good luck! 

Hi Stephanie,

we had the same problem in our studies on emotional control to differentiate these areas.

We used the following argumentation in our papers: For instance in Veit/Lotze et al., Neuroimage 2010:

“Unfortunately there is no clear-cut description of the boarders of the dorsal and ventral subdivisions of  the medial PFC. For the dorsal mPFC, we created a mask covering the medial part of BA 8 and BA 9. The exact boundaries were x=20 to −20 mm, y=+39 to +69 mm and z=+5 to +60 mm. For the ventral mPFC, we used the same boundaries in x and y direction, but lower boundaries in the axial direction (z = + 5 to − 27).“

Best, Martin

Have you looked in the brain atlas? You might find the coordinates there.