Cross-hemispheric recruitment during action planning with increasing task demand

Abstract

The recruitment of cross-hemispheric counterparts of lateralized prefrontal brain regions with increasing processing demand is thought to increase memory performance despite cognitive aging, but was recently reported to be present also in young adults working at their capacity limit. Here we ask if cross-hemispheric recruitment is a general strategy of the adult brain in that executive task demand would modulate bilateral activation beyond prefrontal cortex and across cognitive tasks. We analyzed data sets from two fMRI experiments investigating retrospective working memory maintenance and prospective action planning. We confirmed a cross-hemispheric recruitment of prefrontal cortex across tasks and experiments. Changes in lateralization due to planning further surfaced in the cerebellum, dorsal premotor and posterior parietal cortex. Parietal cortex thereby exhibited cross-hemispheric recruitment also during spatial but not verbal working memory maintenance. Our results confirm a domain-general role of prefrontal cortex in cross-hemispheric recruitment. They further suggest that other task-specific brain regions also recruit their idling cross-hemispheric counterparts to relocate executive processing power.