Adaptive coding in the human brain: Distinct object features are encoded by overlapping voxels in frontoparietal...

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Neuroimaging
• Human Brain Function

Background:

• Cognitive control involves flexibly switching between tasks.
• Prefrontal neurons in non-human primates reconfigure to code task-relevant information.
• The human multiple demand (MD) system is hypothesized to control tasks by adjusting responses.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether the same or different neural resources are recruited in the human brain for different tasks.
• To bridge the gap between non-human primate and human studies on task-switching.
• To examine human functional imaging data at the voxel level to quantify contributions to multiple neural codes.

Main Methods:

• Participants alternated between two feature-selection tasks.
• Examined if neural codes for relevant stimulus features in both tasks relied on the same or different voxels.
• Quantified voxel contribution to multiple neural codes using functional imaging data.

Main Results:

• Multiple demand (MD) region voxels were more likely to contribute to multiple neural codes than predicted by permutation tests.
• Neural codes in the visual system relied on distinct sets of voxels for each task.
• Data highlight the adaptive coding flexibility of MD regions.

Conclusions:

• The multiple demand (MD) system in the human brain exhibits flexibility, reconfiguring responses to adaptively code relevant information across tasks.
• This finding supports the role of the MD system in cognitive control and task switching.
• Human voxel-level analysis provides intermediate resolution to understand neural resource recruitment for cognitive flexibility.