The intrinsic propagation directionality of fMRI infra-slow activity during visual tasks

The temporal order of propagation in the blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) infra-slow activity (ISA, 0.01-0.1 Hz) of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can indicate the functional organization of the brain. While prior studies have revealed the temporal order of propagation of BOLD ISA during rest, how it emerges during cognitive tasks remains unclear. Furthermore, its differences between the gray and white matters at the whole-brain scale are unexplored. In this study, we probed the propagation of BOLD ISA using a publicly available fMRI dataset from participants performing visual detection and discrimination tasks (N = 46, 29 females). We examined the temporal order of propagation based on ISA oscillatory phase differences among brain parcels. During visual task performance, ISA in both the gray and white matters propagated in a direction from the visual cortex to the association cortex, including the default mode network (DMN). This result differs from the previously reported propagation direction during rest that traveled from the visual and somatosensory cortices to the DMN, suggesting that the functional organization may change when performing cognitive tasks. In addition, the propagation in the white matter represented more complex patterns than that in the gray matter, exhibiting that the cingulum preceded DMN. Our results may help the understanding of how task performance alters the sensory-DMN propagation according of ISA.