Abstract
It has been proposed that two relatively independent cognitive control networks exist in the brain: the cingulo-opercular network (CO) and the fronto-parietal network (FP). Past work has shown that chronic brain lesions affect these networks independently. It remains unclear, however, how these two networks are affected by acute brain disruptions. To examine this, we conducted a within-subject theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation (TBS) experiment in healthy individuals that targeted left anterior insula/frontal operculum (L aI/fO, a region in the CO network), left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (L dlPFC, a region in the FP network), or left primary somatosensory cortex (L S1, an experimental control region). Functional connectivity (FC) was measured in resting state fMRI scans collected before and after continuous TBS on each day. We found that TBS was accompanied by generalized increases in network connectivity, especially FP network connectivity, after TBS to either region involved in cognitive control. Whole-brain analyses demonstrated that the L dlPFC and L aI/fO showed increased connectivity with regions in frontal, parietal, and cingulate cortex after TBS to either L dlPFC or L aI/fO, but not to L S1. These results suggest that acute disruption by TBS to cognitive control regions causes widespread changes in network connectivity not limited to the targeted networks.
Highlights
Cognitive control is an essential ability that allows humans to interact with their environment and carry out complex goaldirected behaviors
Many previous studies have suggested that focal damage can modify functional connectivity (FC) across regions remote from the lesion site and throughout distributed networks (He et al, 2007; Grefkes et al, 2008; Mintzopoulos et al, 2009; Sharma et al, 2009; Warren et al, 2009; Carter et al, 2010; Nomura et al, 2010; Van Meer et al, 2010; Wang et al, 2010; Ovadia-Caro et al, 2013)
After damage, changes in behavioral recovery over time track with changes in FC in particular subsystems [attention: (He et al, 2007; Carter et al, 2010), somatomotor: (Sharma et al, 2009; Carter et al, 2010; Wang et al, 2010), somatomotor in rats: (Van Meer et al, 2010), multiple cortical networks: (Ovadia-Caro et al, 2013)], suggesting that modified connectivity may serve as a sensitive marker of reorganization after disruption
Summary
Cognitive control is an essential ability that allows humans to interact with their environment and carry out complex goaldirected behaviors. Recent work from Dosenbach and colleagues used activation data from a variety of different tasks (Dosenbach et al, 2006) combined with resting-state functional connectivity (FC) measurements (Dosenbach et al, 2007) to suggest that two separable cognitive control networks exist in the human brain (Dosenbach et al, 2008): the fronto-parietal (or FP) network and the cingulo-opercular (or CO) network (see Figure 1). The FP network is composed of dorsolateral frontal and parietal regions, the precuneus, and the mid-cingulate and is proposed to operate at fast time-scales for moment-to-moment adaptive task control. The CO network is composed of regions in the anterior insula/frontal operculum, anterior prefrontal cortex, dorsal anterior cingulate, and thalamus, and is proposed to operate over longer time-scales for stable task maintenance. In a large population of subjects, these networks clustered separately from one another during rest, suggesting that they may operate in a somewhat segregated fashion (Dosenbach et al, 2007)
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