Default network activity, coupled with the frontoparietal control network, supports goal-directed cognition
Research Highlights
►Spatiotemporal PLS and rsfcMRI analysis identified distributed brain networks.►The default mode network was engaged during goal-directed behavior.►Default activity was co-active, and coupled, with the frontoparietal control network.
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were 20 healthy, right-handed, young adults (mean age = 21.3, SD = 3.2; range = 18–29; 17 women), with normal or corrected-to-normal visual acuity, and no history of psychiatric, neurological, or other medical illness that could compromise cognitive functions. All participants were paid for, and gave written informed consent prior to, participation, in accordance with the guidelines of the Committee on the Use of Human Subjects in Research at Harvard University and the Human Subjects
Behavioral findings
Behavioral data, collected at the end of each trial as well as in a post-scan interview of autobiographical plans, confirmed participant compliance. Participants produced moderately detailed autobiographical plans in the time provided (mean detail rating = 2.9 (out of 4), SD = .9; mean RT = 14.22 s, SD = 2.1). Nearly all plans had some amount of detail (95%, SD = 7%). In the post-scan interview, we verified that participants had generated autobiographical plans. The median time to completion of goals was
Discussion
We tested the hypothesis that the frontoparietal control network would be flexibly engaged with either the default or dorsal attention network in support of goal-directed cognition. In a data-driven multivariate PLS analysis, we found that autobiographical planning, like imagining personal future events, engages the default network. Consistent with previous observations, we also observed activity in the dorsal attention network while subjects engaged in visuospatial planning (Baker et al., 1996
Acknowledgments
We thank Tanveer Talukdar, Hesheng Liu, Itamar Kahn and Randy Buckner for preprocessing and rsfcMRI tools, Karen Spreng for her assistance, and Randy McIntosh and Justin Vincent for helpful advice. This work was supported by NIH grant MH060941 to DLS.
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