Department of Neuropsychology and Psychopharmacology, Maastricht University, Universiteitssingel 40 (East), 6229 ER, Maastricht, The Netherlands.
Department of Computational Neuroscience, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Martinistr. 52, 20246, Hamburg, Germany.
Brain Struct Funct. 2018 Jun;223(5):2455-2473. doi: 10.1007/s00429-018-1638-9. Epub 2018 Mar 3.
A subset of regions in the lateral and medial prefrontal cortex and the anterior insula increase their activity level whenever a cognitive task becomes more demanding, regardless of the specific nature of this demand. During execution of a task, these areas and the surrounding cortex temporally encode aspects of the task context in spatially distributed patterns of activity. It is not clear whether these patterns reflect underlying anatomical subnetworks that still exist when task execution has finished. We use fMRI in 12 participants performing alternating blocks of three cognitive tasks to address this question. A first data set is used to define multiple demand regions in each participant. A second dataset from the same participants is used to determine multiple demand voxel assemblies with a preference for one task over the others. We then show that these voxels remain functionally coupled during execution of non-preferred tasks and that they exhibit stronger functional connectivity during rest. This indicates that the assemblies of task preference sharing voxels reflect patterns of underlying anatomical connections. Moreover, we show that voxels preferring the same task have more similar whole brain functional connectivity profiles that are consistent across participants. This suggests that voxel assemblies differ in patterns of input-output connections, most likely reflecting task demand-specific information exchange.
内侧和外侧前额叶皮层以及前岛的一部分区域，无论这种需求的具体性质如何，只要认知任务变得更加复杂，其活动水平就会提高。在执行任务期间，这些区域及其周围皮质会以时空分布的活动模式暂时对任务上下文的各个方面进行编码。目前尚不清楚这些模式是否反映了任务执行完成后仍然存在的潜在解剖子网络。我们使用 fMRI 在 12 名参与者中执行三种认知任务的交替块来解决这个问题。第一个数据集用于定义每个参与者的多个需求区域。第二个数据集来自同一参与者，用于确定对特定任务具有偏好的多个需求体素集合。然后，我们表明这些体素在非首选任务的执行过程中仍然保持功能耦合，并且在休息时表现出更强的功能连接。这表明任务偏好共享体素的集合反映了潜在解剖连接的模式。此外，我们还表明，偏好相同任务的体素具有更相似的全脑功能连接模式，这些模式在参与者之间是一致的。这表明体素集合在输入-输出连接模式上存在差异，这很可能反映了特定于任务需求的信息交换。
