Dynamic reconfiguration of the default mode network during narrative comprehension

By E. Simony, Christopher J. Honey, Janice Chen, Olga Lositsky, Y. Yeshurun, Ami Wiesel, Uri Hasson. Nature Communications, 2016

577 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Does the default mode network (DMN) reconfigure to encode information about the changing environment? This question has proven difficult, because patterns of functional connectivity reflect a mixture of stimulus-induced neural processes, intrinsic neural processes and non-neuronal noise. Here we introduce inter-subject functional correlation (ISFC), which isolates stimulus-dependent inter-regional correlations between brains exposed to the same stimulus. During fMRI, we had subjects listen to a real-life auditory narrative and to temporally scrambled versions of the narrative. We used ISFC to isolate correlation patterns within the DMN that were locked to the processing of each narrative segment and specific to its meaning within the narrative context. The momentary configurations of DMN ISFC were highly replicable across groups. Moreover, DMN coupling strength predicted memory of narrative segments. Thus, ISFC opens new avenues for linking brain network dynamics to stimulus features and behaviour. Default mode network (DMN) is strongly modulated by idiosyncratic internal processes, but its involvement in processing external stimuli is unclear. Here, Simony and colleagues use an inter-subject functional correlation approach to extract DMN states that track stimulus features and behaviour.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/67bbff920b98e0edf357ba053856eb19c93bb213

Citations in the corpus

• Questions and controversies in the study of time-varying functional connectivity in resting fMRI (2020, unknown): “, 2016), and that these fluctuations can be reliably tied to narrative elements of the story (Betzel et al., 2019; Manning et al., 2018; Simony et al., 2016) These data provide further evidence that TVFC methods can reveal subtle fluctuations in cognitive state and suggests that variation in ongoing”
• The dynamics of resting fluctuations in the brain: metastability and its dynamical cortical core (2016, unknown): “In addition, motivated by recent experimental and modelling work of other labs 8, 9 , we investigate cortical heterogeneity across areas.”
• Discovering event structure in continuous narrative perception and memory (2016, unknown): “…the maximum probability maps from a cytoarchitectonic atlas (Eickhoff et al., 2005), and we defined early auditory cortex as voxels within the Heschl’s gyrus region (Harvard-Oxford cortical atlas) with reliable intersubject correlation during an audio narrative (“Pieman”, Simony et al., 2016).”
• Switching between internal and external modes: A multiscale learning principle (2017, unknown): “…that demands understanding of semantics (Binder et al., 1999), constructing scenarios (Hassabis & Maguire, 2007), comprehension of narratives or the viewpoint of others (Mars et al., 2012; Simony et al., 2016), or imagining the past and future (Buckner & Carroll, 2007; Spreng, Mar, & Kim, 2009).”