The Salience Network: A Neural System for Perceiving and Responding to Homeostatic Demands

By William W. Seeley. Journal of Neuroscience, 2019

683 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The term “salience network” refers to a suite of brain regions whose cortical hubs are the anterior cingulate and ventral anterior insular (i.e., frontoinsular) cortices. This network, which also includes nodes in the amygdala, hypothalamus, ventral striatum, thalamus, and specific brainstem nuclei, coactivates in response to diverse experimental tasks and conditions, suggesting a domain-general function. In the 12 years since its initial description, the salience network has been extensively studied, using diverse methods, concepts, and mammalian species, including healthy and diseased humans across the lifespan. Despite this large and growing body of research, the essential functions of the salience network remain uncertain. In this paper, which makes no attempt to comprehensively review this literature, I describe the circumstances surrounding the initial discovery, conceptualization, and naming of the salience network, highlighting aspects that may be unfamiliar to many readers. I then discuss some of the key advances provided by subsequent research and conclude by posing a few of the questions that remain to be explored.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7b638cdbb03a66e0f8eae6354291797cb09d1e74

Citations in the corpus

• Multi-task Intracranial EEG recordings reveal a Comprehensive Role of the Human Dorsal Anterior Insula in High-Level Cognition (2025, unknown): “In fact, Seeley ( Seeley, 2019 ) suggested that the insular compo-386 nent of the SN is the ventral anterior insula (vAI), whereas the dAI belongs to a separate network originally termed the Cingulo-Opercular Network (CON), involved in the initiation and maintenance of task sets ( Dosenbach et al.,…”
• The Inferior Frontal Sulcus, not the Anterior Insula, acts as a late-stage attentional gate for the fast rejection of salient but irrelevant sensory inputs during cognitive tasks (2025, unknown): “…anchored in the anterior insula (AI) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), has been proposed to detect stimuli with high homeostatic relevance ( Seeley, 2019 ), while the ventral attention network (VAN)—a right-57 lateralized frontoparietal system that also includes the AI—has been associated…”