Centralized and distributed cognitive task processing in the human connectome

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel information-theoretic framework using Jensen-Shannon divergence to quantify and analyze changes in functional connectivity across different cognitive tasks and resting states in the human connectome.

Contribution

It presents a new method for measuring pairwise functional connectome distances across tasks, linking functional changes to structural connectivity, advancing understanding of cognitive processing.

Findings

Identified the most distant links across tasks in the human connectome.

Linked connectivity changes to specific functional brain networks.

Demonstrated how structural connectivity influences task-related FC changes.

Abstract

A key question in modern neuroscience is how cognitive changes in a human brain can be quantified and captured by functional connectomes (FC) . A systematic approach to measure pairwise functional distance at different brain states is lacking. This would provide a straight-forward way to quantify differences in cognitive processing across tasks; also, it would help in relating these differences in task-based FCs to the underlying structural network. Here we propose a framework, based on the concept of Jensen-Shannon divergence, to map the task-rest connectivity distance between tasks and resting-state FC. We show how this information theoretical measure allows for quantifying connectivity changes in distributed and centralized processing in functional networks. We study resting-state and seven tasks from the Human Connectome Project dataset to obtain the most distant links across tasks. We investigate how these changes are associated to different functional brain networks, and use the proposed measure to infer changes in the information processing regimes. Furthermore, we show how the FC distance from resting state is shaped by structural connectivity, and to what extent this relationship depends on the task. This framework provides a well grounded mathematical quantification of connectivity changes associated to cognitive processing in large-scale brain networks.