OHBM 2022 | 160 | Talk | Hayoung Song | Neural dynamics in a low-dimensional state space reflect c…

Title: Neural dynamics in a low-dimensional state space reflect cognitive and attentional dynamics.
Session: Talk
Speaker: Hayoung Song
Cognition and attention arise from the adaptive coordination of neural systems in response to external and internal demands. The low-dimensional latent subspace that underlies large-scale neural dynamics and the relationships of these dynamics to cognitive and attentional states, however, are unknown. We conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging as human participants performed attention tasks, watched comedy sitcom episodes and an educational documentary, and rested. Whole-brain dynamics traversed a common set of latent states that spanned canonical gradients of functional brain organization, with global synchrony among functional networks modulating state transitions. Neural state transitions were temporally aligned to narrative event boundaries and changes in cognitive task demands, and reflected attentional states in task and naturalistic contexts in multiple independent datasets. Together, these results demonstrate that traversals along large-scale gradients of human brain organization reflect cognitive and attentional dynamics.