Ventral Prefrontal Cortex

The ventral prefrontal cortex learns to associate objects, faces, and vocalizations, and its connectional fingerprint explains why it alone can do so. It receives visual inputs from the inferior temporal cortex and auditory ones from the superior temporal cortex. It combines these inputs with those from the orbital prefrontal (PF) cortex so as to specify the goal that is currently desirable. This is then transformed into the target of search via connections with the frontal eye field and the target for manual retrieval via connections with the premotor areas. The ventral PF cortex can also learn to form associations between objects, for example by linking them into categories. These can be retrieved from long-term memory via connections with the hippocampus.