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The Journal of Neuroscience, October 21, 2009, 29(42):13410-13417; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2592-09.2009

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Distributed and Antagonistic Contributions of Ongoing Activity Fluctuations to Auditory Stimulus Detection

Sepideh Sadaghiani,^1,2,3,4 Guido Hesselmann,^1,2,4 and Andreas Kleinschmidt^1,2,4

¹Unité 562, Cognitive Neuroimaging, Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale and ²Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique, Direction des Sciences du Vivant, Institut d'Imagerie Biomédicale, NeuroSpin, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex, France, ³Graduate School of Neural and Behavioural Sciences, International Max Planck Research School, University of Tübingen, 72074 Tübingen, Germany, and ⁴Université Paris-Sud, 91405 Orsay, France

Correspondence should be addressed to Sepideh Sadaghiani, NeuroSpin/CEA/SAC/DSV/I2BM, Bât 145, Point Courrier 156, F-91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France. Email: sepideh.sadaghiani{at}gmail.com

Recent studies have shown that ongoing activity fluctuations influence trial-by-trial perception of identical stimuli. Some brain systems seem to bias toward better perceptual performance and others toward worse. We tested whether these observations generalize to another as of yet unassessed sensory modality, audition, and a nonspatial but memory-dependent paradigm. In a sparse event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging design, we investigated detection of auditory near-threshold stimuli as a function of prestimulus baseline activity in early auditory cortex as well as several distributed networks that were defined on the basis of resting state functional connectivity. In accord with previous studies, hits were associated with higher prestimulus activity in related early sensory cortex as well as in a system comprising anterior insula, anterior cingulate, and thalamus, which other studies have related to processing salience and maintaining task set. In contrast to previous studies, however, higher prestimulus activity in the so-called dorsal attention system of frontal and parietal cortex biased toward misses, whereas higher activity in the so-called default mode network that includes posterior cingulate and precuneus biased toward hits. These results contradict a simple dichotomic view on the function of these two latter brain systems where higher ongoing activity in the dorsal attention network would facilitate perceptual performance, and higher activity in the default mode network would deteriorate perceptual performance. Instead, we show that the way in which ongoing activity fluctuations impact on perception depends on the specific sensory (i.e., nonspatial) and cognitive (i.e., mnemonic) context that is relevant.

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Received May 29, 2009; revised Sept. 2, 2009; accepted Sept. 21, 2009.

Correspondence should be addressed to Sepideh Sadaghiani, NeuroSpin/CEA/SAC/DSV/I2BM, Bât 145, Point Courrier 156, F-91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France. Email: sepideh.sadaghiani{at}gmail.com

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