


Researchers help identify the neural basis of multitasking

Researchers help identify the neural basis of multitasking

Researchers help identify the neural basis of multitasking

Researchers help identify the neural basis of multitasking

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What makes someone better at switching between different tasks? Looking for the mechanisms behind cognitive flexibility, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) and Germany's Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim and Charité University Medicine Berlin have used brain scans to shed new light on this question.

By studying networks of activity in the brain's frontal cortex, a region associated with control over thoughts and actions, the researchers have shown that the degree to which these networks reconfigure themselves while switching from task to task predicts people's cognitive flexibility.



Danielle Bassett, the Skirkanich Assistant Professor of Innovation in Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science, is senior author on the study. Manheim's Urs Braun and Axel Schäfer were the lead authors. The research also featured work from Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg and Heike Tost of Mannheim, Henrik Walter of Charité, and others.


Rather than looking at the role a single region in the brain plays, Bassett and colleagues study the interconnections between the regions as indicated by synchronized activity. Using fMRI, they can measure which parts of the brain are "talking" to one another as study participants perform various tasks. Mapping the way this activity network reconfigures itself provides a more holistic view of how the brain operates.

"We try to understand how dynamic flexibility of brain networks can predict cognitive flexibility, or the ability to switch from task to task," Bassett said. "Rather than being driven by the activity of single brain areas, we believe executive function is a network-level process."

A previous study that Bassett led showed that people who could more quickly "disconnect" their frontal cortices did better on a task that involved pressing keys that corresponded to color-coded notes on a screen. The high level decision-making associated with the frontal cortex's cognitive control wasn't as critical to playing the short sequences of notes, so those who still engaged this part of the brain were essentially overthinking a simple problem.


Urs Braun and Axel Schäfer, the lead authors on the paper, collaborated with Bassett, who has developed novel tools from network science to distill evolving brain connections. They used these tools to map how participants' brain activities rearranged during each block of the working memory task, each block of the control task and blocks in between where participants switched gears.





University of Pennsylvania   press release


Bassett DS et al. Dynamic reconfiguration of frontal brain networks during executive cognition in humans.   Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Published Online August 31 2015. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1422487112