Recruitment of the default mode network during a demanding act of executive control
- Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, United Kingdom
Abstract
In the human brain, a default mode or task-negative network shows reduced activity during many cognitive tasks, and is often associated with internally-directed processes such as mind wandering and thoughts about the self. In contrast to this task-negative pattern, we show increased activity during a large and demanding switch in task set. Furthermore, we employ multi-voxel pattern analysis and find that regions of interest within default mode network are encoding task-relevant information during task performance. Activity in this network may be driven by major revisions of cognitive context, whether internally or externally focused.
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Human subjects: Informed consent, and consent to publish, was obtained through the University of Cambridge ethics committee:CPREC (Cambridge Psychology Research Ethics) 2010.16.
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© 2015, Crittenden et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Recruitment of the default mode network during a demanding act of executive control
eLife 4:e06481.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.06481
Further reading
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- Neuroscience
When holding visual information temporarily in working memory (WM), the neural representation of the memorandum is distributed across various cortical regions, including visual and frontal cortices. However, the role of stimulus representation in visual and frontal cortices during WM has been controversial. Here, we tested the hypothesis that stimulus representation persists in the frontal cortex to facilitate flexible control demands in WM. During functional MRI, participants flexibly switched between simple WM maintenance of visual stimulus or more complex rule-based categorization of maintained stimulus on a trial-by-trial basis. Our results demonstrated enhanced stimulus representation in the frontal cortex that tracked demands for active WM control and enhanced stimulus representation in the visual cortex that tracked demands for precise WM maintenance. This differential frontal stimulus representation traded off with the newly-generated category representation with varying control demands. Simulation using multi-module recurrent neural networks replicated human neural patterns when stimulus information was preserved for network readout. Altogether, these findings help reconcile the long-standing debate in WM research, and provide empirical and computational evidence that flexible stimulus representation in the frontal cortex during WM serves as a potential neural coding scheme to accommodate the ever-changing environment.
