Functional specialization within the inferior parietal lobes across cognitive domains
Abstract
The inferior parietal lobe (IPL) is a key neural substrate underlying diverse mental processes, from basic attention to language and social cognition, that define human interactions. Its putative domain-global role appears to tie into poorly understood differences between cognitive domains in both hemispheres. Across attentional, semantic, and social cognitive tasks, our study explored functional specialization within the IPL. The task specificity of IPL subregion activity was substantiated by distinct predictive signatures identified by multivariate pattern-learning algorithms. Moreover, the left and right IPL exerted domain-specific modulation of effective connectivity among their subregions. Task-evoked functional interactions of the anterior and posterior IPL subregions involved recruitment of distributed cortical partners. While anterior IPL subregions were engaged in strongly lateralized coupling links, both posterior subregions showed more symmetric coupling patterns across hemispheres. Our collective results shed light on how under-appreciated functional specialization in the IPL supports some of the most distinctive human mental capacities.
Data availability
Preprocessed fMRI data and behavioral data are publicly available at the Open Science Framework doi:10.17605/OSF.IO/9NDHP .
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (BZ2/4-1,BZ2/3-1,BZ2/2-1)
- Danilo Bzdok
National Institutes of Health (R01AG068563A)
- Danilo Bzdok
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (HA 6314/3-1,HA 6314/4-1)
- Gesa Hartwigsen
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: The study was performed according to the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the Ethics Committee of the Medical Faculty of the University of Leipzig, Germany (282/16-eh). Written informed consent was obtained from all subjects before the experiment.
Copyright
© 2021, Numssen 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.
Metrics
-
- 7,833
- views
-
- 781
- downloads
-
- 86
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
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)
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
γ-Secretase plays a pivotal role in the central nervous system. Our recent development of genetically encoded Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET)-based biosensors has enabled the spatiotemporal recording of γ-secretase activity on a cell-by-cell basis in live neurons in culture. Nevertheless, how γ-secretase activity is regulated in vivo remains unclear. Here, we employ the near-infrared (NIR) C99 720–670 biosensor and NIR confocal microscopy to quantitatively record γ-secretase activity in individual neurons in living mouse brains. Intriguingly, we uncovered that γ-secretase activity may influence the activity of γ-secretase in neighboring neurons, suggesting a potential ‘cell non-autonomous’ regulation of γ-secretase in mouse brains. Given that γ-secretase plays critical roles in important biological events and various diseases, our new assay in vivo would become a new platform that enables dissecting the essential roles of γ-secretase in normal health and diseases.
-
- Neuroscience
The neurotransmitter dopamine helps form long-term memories by increasing the production of proteins through a unique signaling pathway.