Recruitment of the default mode network during a demanding act of executive control
- Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, United Kingdom
- University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
- University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Figures
Figure 1
Task description.
The experiment required participants to learn six tasks prior to scanning. (A) The six tasks were each associated with a different rule, as determined by the colour border. The tasks were split into three groups defined by stimulus category, with two possible tasks per stimulus type. (B) Experimental design. Within each run, trials using the six tasks occurred in random order. A no-switch trial occurred when participants had to apply the same task that was applied on the previous trial. A similar-task-switch trial occurred when participants had to apply the other task from the same category as the previous trial. A dissimilar-task-switch occurred when participants had to apply a task from a different category compared to the previous trial.
Figure 2
Activation of the default mode network (DMN) for dissimilar task switches.
Region labels and regions of interest (ROIs) are color-coded according to the sub-network to which they belong: yellow for Core, green for medial temporal lobe (MTL), blue for dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC). (A) Whole brain rendering in axial slices: the numbers above each slice indicate z-coordinate of that slice. The contrast of dissimilar-task-switch > no-switch (T = 3.23, p < 0.05, FDR corrected) shows activations in regions previously identified as the DMN. (B) Locations of DMN ROIs distinguished by Andrews-Hanna et al. (C) Change in activation of similar-task-switch (darker colours) and dissimilar-task-switch (lighter colours) relative to no-switch trials in the DMN ROIs. APMFC: anterior medial prefrontal cortex, PCC: posterior cingulate cortex, pIPL: posterior inferior parietal lobe, Rsp: retrosplenial cortex, PHC: parahippocampal cortex, HF: hippocampal formation, VMPFC: ventromedial prefrontal cortex, TPJ: temporoparietal junction, LTC: lateral temporal cortex, TempP: temporal pole, DMPFC: dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. * indicates p < 0.05.
Figure 3
Activation associated with each between category switch.
An exploratory analysis looking at the activation/deactivation associated with switching between each of the three task categories. Core and MTL sub-networks predominantly show increased activation following a dissimilar task switch across switch types, whereas DMPFC shows a relative decrease in activation. Abbreviations: sem = semantic category, per = perceptual, lex = lexical. * denotes p < 0.05 from a paired, two-tailed t-test.
Figure 4
Classification accuracy (CA) within the DMN sub-network ROIs.
(A) Classification accuracies between different task pairs in all DMN ROIs. Large correlation matrix used as example is the same as left HF. The colour of the circle in the key matches with the colour borders used to indicate each task in Figure 1A: Red for ‘bigger than a shoebox?’, blue for ‘living?’, brown for ‘same shape?’, pink for ‘same height?’, green for ‘does adding A make a word?’, purple for ‘does adding I make a word’? Matrices show the classification accuracy of decoding each task pair; values below the diagonal show classification accuracy for all task pairs, while non-grey values above the diagonal show only decoding that survived the threshold for statistical significance. The colour borders indicate the sub-network that the ROIs belong to: core (yellow), MTL (green), and DMPFC (blue). ROIs on the left side of each box are from the left hemisphere, those on the right are from the right hemisphere. (B) All three sub-networks demonstrated above-chance classification accuracy when decoding dissimilar tasks, while only the DMPFC sub-network demonstrated significant decoding of similar task pairs. Error bars indicate standard error. * indicates p < 0.05.
Figure 5
The influence of response time (RT) on classification accuracy.
(A) Correlation between classification accuracy and RT difference in the three DMN sub-networks. Each point represents data for a single task pair in a single subject, with mean CA across ROIs of the named sub-network plotted against absolute RT difference. The darker shades in each graph are taken from the similar task pairs, while the lighter shades are taken from the dissimilar task pairs. (B) Beta estimates for the association of CA and RT in each subject for similar and dissimilar task pairs of the three DMN sub-networks. In each graph subjects' beta estimates are sorted is in ascending order. Top row, a–c, displays beta estimates for similar task pairs in the Core, MTL and DMPFC, respectively. Bottom row, d–f, shows beta estimates for dissimilar task pairs in the Core, MTL and DMPFC, respectively. The p-value from a 2-tailed, 1-way t-test of each graph's beta values is shown.
Tables
Table 1
Peak coordinates of DMN regions that showed significantly greater activation for dissimilar-task-switch over no-switch
| ROI | hemisphere | x | y | z | t-statistic |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HF | left | −30 | −36 | −6 | 3.64 |
| right | 33 | −36 | −9 | 3.73 | |
| PHC | left | −21 | −42 | 9 | 4.87 |
| right | 30 | −39 | 6 | 6.81 | |
| Rsp | left | −9 | −48 | 12 | 3.97 |
| right | 9 | −51 | 12 | 3.89 | |
| PCC | left | −12 | −54 | 24 | 5.12 |
| right | 12 | −51 | 24 | 5.16 | |
| AMPFC | left | −9 | 51 | −6 | 3.24 |
| right | 9 | 48 | −3 | 3.72 | |
| pIPL | left | −39 | −75 | 33 | 3.58 |
-
Coordinates are in MNI space. HF = hippocampal formation, PHC = parahippocampus, Rsp = retrosplenial cortex, PCC = posterior cingulate cortex, AMPFC = anterior medial prefrontal cortex, pIPL = posterior inferior parietal lobe.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Recruitment of the default mode network during a demanding act of executive control
eLife 4:e06481.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.06481
