Abstract
Environmental hyperthermia is a common risk factor for occupational safety in many situations due to decreased vigilance performances. Previously, we have reported that decreased resting-state functional connectivity within the default mode network (DMN) and decreased activations in dorsal attention network (DAN) such as dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) were correlated with selective attention deficits during hyperthermia. However, whether the inherent functionally organized anti-correlation between the DMN and DAN would contribute to the behavioral deficits remains unclear. In this study, we collected the resting-state fMRI data of 25 participants during two simulated thermal conditions: normothermic condition (25°C for 1 h) and hyperthermic condition (50°C for 1 h). Using group independent component analysis (ICA), we investigated the functional connectivity within the DMN and DAN, as well as the anti-correlations between both networks. Paired comparisons revealed that decreased intranetwork functional connectivity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC)/anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in the DMN contributed to executive control performance during hyperthermia using multivariate linear regression analysis. Paired comparison on the DAN showed that increased one in the posterior part of the middle and inferior temporal gyrus nearby the temporal–parietal junction area contributed to preserved alerting performance. Lastly but most importantly, we found that decreased correlation between mPFC in the DMN and intraparietal sulcus (IPS) area in the DAN contributed to the executive control deficit, suggesting a weaker intrinsic anti-correlation between DMN and DAN during hyperthermia. These findings indicated that a functional reorganized architecture of DMN and DAN might provide a potential neural basis of the selective deficits for different cognitive-demand attention tasks in high-temperature environments.
Highlights
Environmental high temperature is a common risk factor for occupational safety in many situations due to decreased vigilance, as well as other negative effects on the physiological state of the human body, cognitive thinking, and behavioral ability (Smith et al, 1997; Hocking et al, 2001; Grantham et al, 2010; Mohr et al, 2012)
(2) Within-network functional connectivity between frontal eye field (FEF) and intraparietal sulcus (IPS) areas in the dorsal attention network (DAN) contributed to preserved alerting performance during hyperthermia
These findings indicated that the previously reported attention deficits could be predicted by restingstate brain activity
Summary
Environmental high temperature is a common risk factor for occupational safety in many situations due to decreased vigilance, as well as other negative effects on the physiological state of the human body, cognitive thinking, and behavioral ability (Smith et al, 1997; Hocking et al, 2001; Grantham et al, 2010; Mohr et al, 2012). Hyperthermia exerts its effect on human behavioral performance by draining attention resources (Hancock, 1986; Hancock and Vasmatzidis, 2003). It enhances mental fatigue and deteriorates the long time activity of the brain while performing a sustained attention task that requires constant attention focus (Hancock, 1986; Qian et al, 2015). This would increase the probability of accidents for high-risk occupations. The attention resource during hyperthermia has not been well illustrated
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