Intro | Primary Auditory Cortex | Central Fissure | Frontal Lobe | Lateral Fissure | Primary Motor Cortex | Occipital Lobe | Parietal Lobe | Primary Somatosensory Cortex | Temporal Lobe | Primary Visual Cortex
Part 1: Image-Mapped Tutorial
Part 2: Matching Self-Test
Part 3: Multiple-Choice Self-Test
The Frontal Lobe is the largest lobe in the human brain and is found at the front or anterior end of the cerebrum. It extends from the central fissure to the anterior boundary of the cerebral cortex. The frontal lobes contain the cortical areas that control our motor abilities or movement, including primary motor cortex.
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The anterior pole of the frontal lobe is call prefrontal cortex. This relatively large region is the only one to receive sensory information from all modalities, including autonomic or sensory information from the internal organs. It is the last of cortical regions to develop the basic neuronal connections it needs to function.
Prefrontal cortex is particularly important for guiding behaviors based on an internal representation (or memory) of the external world. Studies of brain development indicate that prefrontal cortex is essential for the phenomenon of object permanence. Object permanence is the ability to know that an object in the world exists, even when it cannot be seen. This ability usually emerges in an infant sometime between seven and twelve months of age; the same age that prefrontal cortex matures to provide the substrate for this ability.
This cortical region is also the site for the earliest (late 1940's) and still controversial ventures into psychosurgery. Prefrontal lobotomies (removal of the lobe) and prefrontal leucotomies (disconnection from other cerebral regions) are still performed today infrequently in an attempt to manage patients with serious psychiatric disorders. The typical consequences of this surgery are apathy and a lack of initiative to interact with the world, an inability to inhibit behaviors deemed socially unacceptable (such as making a sexual advance to a stranger), the perseveration of responses (inflexible behavior) and blunted emotions. Memory and the ability to express emotions through facial expressions are also disrupted by prefrontal damage.