Heightened interactions between a key default-mode region and a key task-positive region are linked to suboptimal current performance but to enhanced future performance
Research highlights
►The DLPFC and the PCC underlie competing modes of processing in attentional tasks. ►Enhanced interactions between these regions were linked to slower current-trial RT. ►This finding provides novel support for the default-mode interference hypothesis. ►Enhanced interactions between these regions were linked to faster next-trial RT. ►This finding suggests a role for such interactions in optimizing future performance.
Section snippets
Participants
Sixteen healthy adults participated in the study. All were right-handed and had normal hearing, normal or corrected-to-normal vision, and no history of neurological or psychiatric disorders. Each gave informed written consent before the experiment and was paid $20 per hour. Two participants were excluded due to excessive head movement (i.e., greater than 3 mm). Data from three participants were excluded due to unusable eye tracker recordings. Eleven participants were thus included in our final
Overall behavior
A repeated-measures ANOVA with the factors task (visual, auditory) and congruency (congruent, incongruent) and mean RT as the dependent measure revealed two main effects and an interaction. First, replicating our prior findings from similar tasks (Weissman et al., 2004, Moore et al., 2009, Orr and Weissman, 2009), there was a main effect of congruency, F(1,10) = 4.82, p = 0.013, since mean RT was longer in incongruent (681 ms) than in congruent trials (652 ms). Second, and also replicating our prior
Discussion
In the present study, we investigated a novel hypothesis: heightened interactions between the PCC and the DLPFC are linked to suboptimal current performance, but to enhanced future performance. Consistent with this view, increases of current-trial functional connectivity between these regions were associated with increases of current-trial RT, but with decreases of next-trial RT. As described below, these findings provide novel support for the default-mode interference hypothesis (Sonuga-Barke
Conclusions
The present findings make several important contributions to the literature. First, they provide novel support for the default-mode interference hypothesis. Second, they suggest that default-mode interference is continuous (rather than discrete) in nature. Third, they show that heightened interactions between a key default-mode region and a key task-positive region are linked to enhanced future performance. Fourth, they indicate a novel double dissociation for current and future performance
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by startup funds provided to Daniel H. Weissman by the University of Michigan. We thank Keith Newnham for his assistance in collecting the fMRI data.
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2018, Progress in NeurobiologyCitation Excerpt :While intrinsically anticorrelated in the resting state (Fox et al., 2005), the DMN and the ECN/SN are reported to exhibit distinct patterns of activities during cognitive tasks, i.e. the DMN activity is generally inhibited whereas the activity in the ECN and SN is enhanced (however, see Brewer et al. (2011); Demertzi et al. (2014) where the authors observed enhanced activity in some components of the DMN during self-referential cognitive tasks, suggesting that there may be differences related to the specific nature of the task or condition vs. true resting state evaluation of the networks). Such opposition of the DMN, ECN and SN activity is critically related to the adjustment, maintenance, and shift of attention as well as cognitive performance (Eichele et al., 2008; Lin et al., 2015; Prado and Weissman, 2011). Using Granger causality analysis, Uddin et al. (2009) showed that the medial PFC (mPFC, mainly BA 10) and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) of the DMN exerted control over a “DMN-anticorrelated” network that highly overlapped the ECN and SN.