Topic: association cortices

How does the organization of neural information processing enable humans’ sophisticated cognition? Here we decompose functional interactions between brain regions into synergistic and redundant components, revealing their distinct information-processing roles. Combining functional, structural, and diffusion-weighted MRI with meta-analytic results from NeuroSynth, we demonstrate that redundant interactions are predominantly associated with structurally coupled, modular sensorimotor processing. Synergistic interactions instead support integrative processes and complex cognition across higher-or

How flexible are association cortices? I will present a series of fMRI experiments addressing this question by investigating individuals born without hands, who use their feet as effectors to perform everyday actions. These results suggest that computations in association cortices are abstracted from visuomotor features and experience, similarly to the visual -independence of the association networks in people born blind, highlighting these regions’ ability to compensate for experience in any specific modality. These findings also open new avenues to utilize effector-independence in the action

Background: The balance of excitation and inhibition (E-I) is a key functional property of cortical microcircuits [1] which changes through lifespan. Adolescence is considered a crucial period for the maturation of E-I balance [2,3]. This has been primarily observed in animal studies, and human in vivo evidence on adolescent maturation of the E-I balance at an individual level is limited. Here, we investigated an in vivo marker of regional E-I balance in human adolescents based on individualized biophysical network models. Methods: Regional E-I balance was estimated using large-scale simulati