Maintenance and Representation of Mind Wandering during Resting-State fMRI.

Abstract

Major advances in resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques in the last two decades have provided a tool to better understand the functional organization of the brain both in health and illness. Despite such developments, characterizing regulation and cerebral representation of mind wandering, which occurs unavoidably during resting-state fMRI scans and may induce variability of the acquired data, remains a work in progress. Here, we demonstrate that a decrease or decoupling in functional connectivity involving the caudate nucleus, insula, medial prefrontal cortex and other domain-specific regions was associated with more sustained mind wandering in particular thought domains during resting-state fMRI. Importantly, our findings suggest that temporal and between-subject variations in functional connectivity of above-mentioned regions might be linked with the continuity of mind wandering. Our study not only provides a preliminary framework for characterizing the maintenance and cerebral representation of different types of mind wandering, but also highlights the importance of taking mind wandering into consideration when studying brain organization with resting-state fMRI in the future.

Department

Description

Provenance

Citation

Published Version (Please cite this version)

10.1038/srep40722

Publication Info

Chou, Ying-Hui, Mark Sundman, Heather E Whitson, Pooja Gaur, Mei-Lan Chu, Carol P Weingarten, David J Madden, Lihong Wang, et al. (2017). Maintenance and Representation of Mind Wandering during Resting-State fMRI. Scientific reports, 7(1). p. 40722. 10.1038/srep40722 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/22533.

This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.

Scholars@Duke

Whitson

Heather Elizabeth Whitson

Duke School of Medicine Distinguished Professor in Neuroscience

Dr. Whitson's research is focused on improving care options and resilience for people with multiple chronic conditions.  In particular, she has interest and expertise related to the link between age-related changes in the eye and brain (e.g., How does late-life vision loss impact the aging brain or cognitive outcomes?  Is Alzheimer's disease associated with distinctive changes in the retina, and could such changes help diagnose Alzheimer's disease early in its course?).  Dr. Whitson leads a collaborative Alzheimer's Disease initiative that brings together investigators from Duke University and the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, with a bold vision to transform dementia research and care across Eastern North Carolina. Dr. Whitson is also interested in improving health services to better meet the needs of medically complex patients.  Within the Duke Aging Center, she leads research efforts aimed at promoting resilience to late-life stressors (e.g., surgery, sensory loss, infection).  She has developed a novel rehabilitation model for people with co-existing vision and cognitive deficits, and she is part of a inter-disciplinary team seeking to improve peri-operative outcomes for frail or at-risk seniors who must undergo surgery.  As a co-leader of a national resilience collaborative, she seeks to better understand the biological and psychological factors that determine how well we "bounce back" after health stressors.  

Madden

David Joseph Madden

Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences

My research focuses primarily on the cognitive neuroscience of aging: the investigation of age-related changes in perception, attention, and memory, using both behavioral measures and neuroimaging techniques, including positron emission tomography (PET), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI).

The behavioral measures have focused on reaction time, with the goal of distinguishing age-related changes in specific cognitive abilities from more general effects arising from a slowing in elementary perceptual processes. The cognitive abilities of interest include selective attention as measured in visual search tasks, semantic and episodic memory retrieval, and executive control processes.

The behavioral measures are necessary to define the cognitive abilities of interest, and the neuroimaging techniques help define the functional neuroanatomy of those abilities. The PET and fMRI measures provide information regarding neural activity during cognitive performance. DTI is a recently developed technique that images the structural integrity of white matter. The white matter tracts of the brain provide critical pathways linking the gray matter regions, and thus this work will complement the studies using PET and fMRI that focus on gray matter activation.

A current focus of the research program is the functional connectivity among regions, not only during cognitive task performance but also during rest. These latter measures, referred to as intrinsic functional connectivity, are beginning to show promise as an index of overall brain functional efficiency, which can be assessed without the implementation of a specific cognitive task. From DTI, information can be obtained regarding how anatomical connectivity constrains intrinsic functional connectivity. It will be important to determine the relative influence of white matter pathway integrity, intrinsic functional connectivity, and task-related functional connectivity, as mediators of age-related differences in behavioral measures of cognitive performance.

Ultimately, the research program can help link age-related changes in cognitive performance to changes in the structure and function of specific neural systems. The results also have implications for clinical translation, in terms of the identification of neural biomarkers for the diagnosis of neural pathology and targeting rehabilitation procedures.

Wang

Lihong Wang

Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Li

Yi-Ju Li

Professor of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics

My research interest is in statistical genetics, including statistical method development and its application for understanding the genetic predisposition of human complex diseases. Here is the list of research topics:

  • Statistical genetics: development of family-based association methods for quantitative traits with or without censoring and for detecting X-linked genes for disease risk.  With the availability of next generation sequencing data, we have ongoing projects to develop the association methods for testing rare variants for different phenotypic measures.  
  • Genetics of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Fuchs endothelial corneal dystrophy (FECD).
  • Genetic basis of age-at-onset of Alzheimer disease. 
  • Peri-operative genomic studies. Investigate the genetic risk factors for postoperative outcomes of patients underwent non-emergent coronary artery bypass grafting with cardiopulmonary bypass.
Song

Allen W Song

Professor in Radiology

The research in our lab is concerned with advancing structural and functional MRI methodologies (e.g. fast and high-resolution imaging techniques) for human brain imaging. We also aim to improve our understanding of functional brain signals, including spatiotemporal characterizations of the blood oxygenation level dependent contrast and alternative contrast mechanisms that are more directly linked to the neuronal activities. Additional effort is invested in applying and validating the developed methods to study human functional neuroanatomy.


Unless otherwise indicated, scholarly articles published by Duke faculty members are made available here with a CC-BY-NC (Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial) license, as enabled by the Duke Open Access Policy. If you wish to use the materials in ways not already permitted under CC-BY-NC, please consult the copyright owner. Other materials are made available here through the author’s grant of a non-exclusive license to make their work openly accessible.