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Tasks Driven by Perceptual Information Do Not Recruit Sustained BOLD Activity in Cingulo-Opercular Regions

2014; Oxford University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/cercor/bhu187

1460-2199

Joseph W. Dubis, Joshua S. Siegel, Maital Neta, Kristina Visscher, Steven E. Petersen,

Neural dynamics and brain function

Sustained blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex/medial superior frontal cortex (dACC/msFC) and bilateral anterior insula/frontal operculum (aI/fO) is found in a broad majority of tasks examined and is believed to function as a putative task set maintenance signal. For example, a meta-analysis investigating task-control signals identified the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula as exhibiting sustained activity across a variety of task types. Re-analysis of tasks included in that meta-analysis showed exceptions, suggesting that tasks where the information necessary to determine a response was present in the stimulus (i.e., perceptually driven) does not show strong sustained cingulo-opercular activity. In a new experiment, we tested the generality of this observation while addressing alternative explanations about sustained cingulo-opercular activity (including task difficulty and verbal vs. non-verbal task demands). A new, difficult, perceptually driven task was compared with 2 new tasks that depended on information beyond that provided by the stimulus. The perceptually driven task showed a lack of cingulo-opercular activity in contrast to the 2 newly constructed tasks. This finding supports the idea that sustained cingulo-opercular activity contributes to maintenance of task set in only a subset of tasks.