The legacy of association cortex

The concept of association cortex emerged from the tradition of an associationist view of human mentation and a localizationist view of cortical organization. Efforts to understand the function of association cortex proceeded under the influence of these philosophic foundations. An alternative to the associationist interpretation is that these parts of cerebral cortex are utilized by different functional systems at different times. This notion is compatible with the distributed systems theory of cortical function and has implications for the neurologist’s approach to lesions of cerebral neocortex.