CAREER: Efficient brain connectome dynamics enabling transitions across cognitive domains

In everyday life, we must continuously and rapidly transition across diverse cognitive domains such as memory, language, social, emotional, and perceptual processes. This project aims to show how the brain maintains the ability to rapidly transition among such a broad range of cognitive processes while still being able to maintain stable focus on a single process when needed. Specifically, the researchers predict a key role for the brain’s state of connectivity, i.e., how distributed brain regions synchronize activity at any given moment, with spontaneous transitions between a diverse set of such brain states enable transitions across cognitive domains. Here, brain states are considered diverse when each of the states allows a different set of brain regions to connect with each other. Flexible transitions across cognitive domains contribute to adaptive functioning in all areas and stages of life. Thus, understanding what brain processes contribute to cognitive transitions would have broad implications for mental health, education, and beyond. Directly building on this research, hands-on educational innovations and public outreach are planned to create broader awareness of ongoing brain processes and their implications. Due to the wide-ranging importance of cognitive flexibility, insights gained from this project may have far-reaching consequences for understanding and improving developmental trajectories and enhancing quality of life. The ability to switch across cognitive domains is not well-captured in classic shifting paradigms; Prior paradigms typically require switching across a small set of task rules or stimulus features, often within one cognitive domain. The proposed research introduces a more ecologically valid paradigm in which participants detect target images or sounds that rapidly switch among diverse cognitive domains. This paradigm, by design, increases cognitive transition demands. Because cognitive domain transitions in everyday life occur at various speeds, this work takes a cutting-edge approach to record brain connectivity concurrently in fMRI to best capture slow processes, and in EEG to have sensitivity to fast processes. Specifically, Objective 1 tests whether brain connectivity states occur in sequences that optimize the diversity of how brain regions are connected over time. Objective 2 tests whether sequences of diverse brain connectivity states support behavioral performance when rapidly transitioning across cognitive domains, whilst retaining the ability to focus on individual domains. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.