Schedule of Events | Symposia

Postdoctorial Fellowship Award Winner

Person-specific changes in brainstem-cortical functional connectivity during cognitive and affective tasks: a 7T fMRI study of humans

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Philip Deming¹ (p.deming@northeastern.edu), Ajay Satpute¹, Karen Quigley¹, Philip Kragel², Marta Bianciardi³, Larry Wald³, Tor Wager⁴, Ji-Kyung Choi⁵, Jiahe Zhang¹, Lisa Feldman Barrett¹, Yuta Katsumi³, Jordan Theriault¹; ¹Northeastern University, ²Emory University, ³Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, ⁴Dartmouth College, ⁵University of California San Francisco

The brain is thought to be a degenerate system: different structures can produce the same function. This implies that the circuits recruited for task performance may be person-specific. Recent efforts to characterize person-specific brain function have largely focused on cortical networks, omitting critical neuromodulatory brainstem nuclei. Thus, we explored person-specific changes in functional connectivity (FC) between brainstem and cortical regions (imaged in 7 Tesla fMRI) during cognitive and affective tasks relative to resting-state. In 72 healthy adults (mean age=27.0 +/- 6.4 years, 32 women), we estimated FC between 360 cortical and 58 brainstem regions during resting-state and tasks (N-back working-memory, Trier social stress). We tested rest vs. task stability of the full brainstem-cortical connectome and of individual connections, separately using group-average and subject-level approaches. In group-average analyses, task connectomes correlated highly with the resting-state connectome (working-memory: r=.93; stress: r=.96), as in prior work. However, subject-level task connectomes only moderately correlated with the resting-state connectome (M r=.64 for each task). Furthermore, within-subject bootstrapping revealed task-related changes varied widely between subjects. For example, although group-average analyses revealed changes in dorsal attention connections to cholinergic brainstem nuclei during the working-memory task, only around 10% of subjects displayed this pattern. Virtually all subjects displayed task-related changes in connections between multiple brainstem neuromodulatory systems and multiple cortical networks, but no two subjects displayed the same pattern of changes. In sum, task-related changes in the brainstem-cortical connectome were person-specific, a characteristic of a degenerate system that would have been hidden by group-aggregate analysis alone.

Topic Area: OTHER