Recruitment of the default mode network during a demanding act of executive control
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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