Summary A core goal in cognitive neuroscience is identifying the physical substrates of the patterns of thought that occupy our daily lives. Contemporary views suggest that the landscape of ongoing experience is heterogeneous and can be influenced by features of both the person and the context. This perspective piece considers recent work that explicitly accounts for both the heterogeneity of the experience and context dependence of patterns of ongoing thought. These studies reveal that systems linked to attention and control are important for organizing experience in response to changing environmental demands. These studies also establish a role of the default mode network beyond task-negative or purely episodic content, for example, implicating it in the level of vivid detail in experience in both task contexts and in spontaneous self-generated experiential states. Together, this work demonstrates that the landscape of ongoing thought is reflected in the activity of multiple neural systems, and it is important to distinguish between processes contributing to how the experience unfolds from those linked to how these experiences are regulated.
Decomposition of whole-brain functional connectivity patterns reveals a principal gradient that captures the separation of sensorimotor cortex from heteromodal regions in the default mode network (DMN). Functional homotopy is strongest in sensorimotor areas, and weakest in heteromodal cortices, suggesting there may be differences between the left and right hemispheres (LH/RH) in the principal gradient, especially towards its apex. This study characterised hemispheric differences in the position of large-scale cortical networks along the principal gradient, and their functional significance. We collected resting-state fMRI and semantic, working memory and non-verbal reasoning performance in 175 + healthy volunteers. We then extracted the principal gradient of connectivity for each participant, tested which networks showed significant hemispheric differences on the gradient, and regressed participants’ behavioural efficiency in tasks outside the scanner against interhemispheric gradient differences for each network. LH showed a higher overall principal gradient value, consistent with its role in heteromodal semantic cognition. One frontotemporal control subnetwork was linked to individual differences in semantic cognition: when it was nearer heteromodal DMN on the principal gradient in LH, participants showed more efficient semantic retrieval—and this network also showed a strong hemispheric difference in response to semantic demands but not working memory load in a separate study. In contrast, when a dorsal attention subnetwork was closer to the heteromodal end of the principal gradient in RH, participants showed better visual reasoning. Lateralization of function may reflect differences in connectivity between control and heteromodal regions in LH, and attention and visual regions in RH.
The COVID-19 pandemic led to lockdowns in countries across the world, changing the lives of billions of people. The United Kingdom’s first national lockdown, for example, restricted people’s ability to socialize and work. The current study examined how changes to socializing and working during this lockdown impacted ongoing thought patterns in daily life. We compared the prevalence of thought patterns between two independent real-world, experience-sampling cohorts, collected before and during lockdown. In both samples, young (18 to 35 y) and older (55+ y) participants completed experience-sampling measures five times daily for 7 d. Dimension reduction was applied to these data to identify common “patterns of thought.” Linear mixed modeling compared the prevalence of each thought pattern 1) before and during lockdown, 2) in different age groups, and 3) across different social and activity contexts. During lockdown, when people were alone, social thinking was reduced, but on the rare occasions when social interactions were possible, we observed a greater increase in social thinking than prelockdown. Furthermore, lockdown was associated with a reduction in future-directed problem solving, but this thought pattern was reinstated when individuals engaged in work. Therefore, our study suggests that the lockdown led to significant changes in ongoing thought patterns in daily life and that these changes were associated with changes to our daily routine that occurred during lockdown.
Previous research has indicated that health and well-being are impacted on by both the way we think, and the things we do. In the laboratory, studies suggest that specific task contexts affect this process because the people we are with, the places we are in, and the activities we perform may influence our thought patterns. In our study participants completed multi-dimensional experience-sampling surveys eight times per day for 5 days to generate thought data across a variety of dimensions in daily life. Principal component analysis was used to decompose the experience sampling data, and linear mixed modelling related these patterns to the activity in daily life in which they emerged. Our study replicated the influence of socializing on patterns of ongoing thought observed in our prior study and established that this is part of a broader set of relationship that links our current activities to how our thoughts are organised in daily life. We also found that factors such as time of day and the physical location are associated with reported patterns of thought, factors that are important for future studies to explore. Our study suggests that sampling thinking in the real world may be able to provide a set of comprehensive thinking-activity mappings that will be useful to researchers and health care professionals interested in health and well-being.
Cognitive neuroscience has gained insight into covert states using experience sampling. Traditionally, this approach has focused on off-task states, however, task-relevant states are also maintained via covert processes. Our study examined whether experience sampling can also provide insights into covert goal-relevant states that support task performance. To address this question, we developed a neural state-space, using dimensions of brain function variation, that allows neural correlates of overt and covert states to be examined in a common analytic space. We use this to describe brain activity during task performance, its relation to covert states identified via experience sampling, and links between individual variation in overt and covert states and task performance. Our study established activity patterns within association cortex emphasizing the fronto-parietal network both during target detection and a covert state of deliberate task focus which was associated with better task performance. In contrast, periods of vigilance and a covert off-task state were both linked to activity patterns emphasizing the default mode network. Our study shows experience sampling can not only describe covert states that are unrelated to the task at hand, but can also be used to highlight the role fronto-parietal regions play in the maintenance of covert task-relevant states.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.