Bilateral cingulotomy
Neuroimaging also uncovered different sub-regions in the anterior cingulate cortex itself based on their function. These studies showed that the caudal part of the anterior cingulate cortex plays a more important function in cognitive activities that involve attention, salience, interference and response competition. These results combined with electrophysiological investigation of the function of neurons in the anterior cingulate cortex have provided insights that can be used in the improvement of cingulotomy performed on patients treated for OCD. The basis behind this idea is the fact that a variation of certain tasks, Emotional Stroop tasks (ES), which have been particularly identified as exerting effects in OCD patients activate neurons in the more rostral part of the anterior cingulate cortex. Thus, theoretically if bilateral cingulotomy is performed in such patient in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, better results should be obtained.
Sight-reading
Research indicates that the main area of the brain associated with the working memory is the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is located in the frontal lobe of the brain. This area deals with cognition and contains two major neural loops or pathways that are central to processing tasks via the working memory: the visual loop, which is necessary for the visual component of the task, and the phonological loop, which deals with the linguistic aspects of the task (i.e. repeating the word or phrase). Although the hippocampus, in the temporal lobe, is the brain structure most frequently paired with memories, studies have indicated that its role is more vital for consolidation of the short-term memories into long-term ones than the ability to process, carry out, and briefly recall certain tasks.