According to functional studies the posterior cingulate gyrus does not seem as directly involved in motor initiation as the anterior cingulate gyrus does, although it is active when learning a complex motor skill. The posterior cingulate gyrus is seemingly more frequently activated during language tasks (e.g., lexico-semantic processing) than its anterior segment, but its role in emotion is obvious (e.g., fear conditioning) as well as its participation in different types of memory (e.g., topographic memory, episodic memory, etc.). Indeed, the brain areas involved in emotion, mainly the limbic system, including the cingulate gyrus, are the very same areas involved in memory. This simply means that there is a close association between emotion/motivation and memory: only information that is significant from the emotional/motivational point of view is memorized. Emotionally neutral information is usually ignored.
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