Multi-task connectivity reveals flexible hubs for adaptive task control

By Michael W. Cole, Jeremy R. Reynolds, Jonathan D. Power, Grega Repovs, Alan Anticevic, Todd S. Braver. Nature Neuroscience, 2013

1,603 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Extensive evidence suggests that the human ability to adaptively implement a wide variety of tasks is preferentially a result of the operation of a fronto-parietal brain network (FPN). We hypothesized that this network's adaptability is made possible by flexible hubs: brain regions that rapidly update their pattern of global functional connectivity according to task demands. Using recent advances in characterizing brain network organization and dynamics, we identified mechanisms consistent with the flexible hub theory. We found that the FPN's brain-wide functional connectivity pattern shifted more than those of other networks across a variety of task states and that these connectivity patterns could be used to identify the current task. Furthermore, these patterns were consistent across practiced and novel tasks, suggesting that reuse of flexible hub connectivity patterns facilitates adaptive (novel) task performance. Together, these findings support a central role for fronto-parietal flexible hubs in cognitive control and adaptive implementation of task demands.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/84233fd8f63533dd2a779c5810c8fd60fe3c0798

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Intrinsic and task-evoked network architectures of the human brain. (2014, neutral): “This is consistent with recent findings indicating that a fronto-parietal system's FC updates are strongly related to current task demands (Cole et al., 2013).”
Dynamic reconfiguration of frontal brain networks during executive cognition in humans (2015, background): “(31) demonstrating that the frontoparietal network displays a high variance in connectivity over different tasks (Supporting Information).”
Reconfigurable task-dependent functional coupling modes cluster around a core functional architecture (2014, background): “Such reliable changes raise the question of which cognitive state(s), if any, produce the most representative patterns of functional coupling [36], and what dynamic range should be expected across substantially varied behavioural paradigms.”
Capturing the spatiotemporal dynamics of self-generated, task-initiated thoughts with EEG and fMRI (2019, neutral): “Time-resolved fMRI studies previously demonstrated that the RSNs spontaneously fluctuate in and out of spatially and temporally overlapping correlations (Cabral et al., 2017; Cole et al., 2014; Cole et al., 2013; de Pasquale et al., 2017; Hutchinson and Raff, 2014; Karahanoglu and Van De Ville, 2015”
Towards a Universal Taxonomy of Macro-scale Functional Human Brain Networks (2019, neutral): “…see the high degree of functional and anatomical overlap between the ventral attention network and salience network as evidence that they are part of the same system (Kucyi et al. 2012), others have conceptualized these networks as distinct entities (Power et al. 2011; Cole et al. 2013).”
The Dynamics of Functional Brain Networks: Integrated Network States during Cognitive Task Performance (2015, neutral): “Together, these results suggest that the performance of psychological tasks causes a targeted reorganization of the integrative core of the brain into a unique network assembly that is integral for the performance of each task (22,23).”
Generation and Evaluation of a Cortical Area Parcellation from Resting-State Correlations. (2016, background): “2012), task control processes (Cole et al. 2013), and deficits related to neuropsychological disorders such as Autism (Rudie et al.”
The Human Thalamus Is an Integrative Hub for Functional Brain Networks (2016, background): “Cortical connector hubs are proposed to integrate information across segregated functional brain networks (Bertolero et al., 2015; Cole et al., 2013; van den Heuvel and Sporns, 2013; Yeo et al., 2015).”
Heterogeneity within the frontoparietal control network and its relationship to the default and dorsal attention networks (2017, background): “Other work has emphasized that the FPCN is a flexible hub that coordinates processing across other networks in a task-dependent manner (5, 7, 94).”
Application of Graph Theory for Identifying Connectivity Patterns in Human Brain Networks: A Systematic Review (2019, background): “In the course of dynamic reorganization, the parietal and frontal brain regions that hold several connector (inter-modular) hubs are discerned to play crucial roles by regulating their brain-wide connections (Cole et al., 2013; Braun et al., 2015).”