What if we got the organization of prefrontal cortex all wrong - maybe even backwards? That seems to be a conclusion one might draw from a 2010 Neuroimage paper by Yoshida, Funakoshi, & Ishii. But that would be the wrong conclusion: thanks to an ingenious mistake, Yoshida et al have apparently managed to "reverse" the functional organization of prefrontal cortex.
First things first: the task performed by subjects was very tricky. Yoshida et al asked subjects to sort three stimuli, which were presented simultaneously. Each of the three differs from each other in three ways: number of…