Cognitive abilities and Brain Connectivity - A resting state fMRI study

Abstract

There are an increasing number of studies that are investigating how intrinsic (i.e. resting-state) functional connectivity correlates with cognitive abilities. However, our current understanding about the neural basis of inter-individual differences in cognitive abilities among healthy subjects is limited. Here we investigate correlation of MR-based intrinsic connectivity with multi-domain cognitive abilities in twenty-five healthy male subjects. Our results show that several cognitive abilities from different domains like music perception, empathy quotient, emotion recognition, mathematical abilities, logical reasoning, executive functions like working memory, response inhibition, fluency etc., attention, mental rotation tasks, motor speed, memory and language ability like comprehension, vocabulary, memory etc. are strongly positively correlated with each other. Connectivity within the task-negative network (TNN) is does not appear to correlate with test performance while connectivity within task positive networks (TPN) as also between TPN and TNN are correlated with test performance, suggesting that TPN connectivity, but not TNN connectivity, subserves inter-individual differences in cognitive abilities. Each cognitive test showed score correlation with specific Regions of Interest (ROI) pairs. Most of these ROIs have also been shown by previous studies to be activated by the respective tasks. Thus we show that even at rest, the functional architecture of the brain, and in particular of those regions invoked by the task, correlates with cognitive performance across a wide range of cognitive domains.