Brain Network Organization and Dynamics

In recent years, cognitive neuroscience has seen an explosion of interest in network-based approaches to the human brain, and the brain is increasingly seen as functioning via the dynamic interaction between networks at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Work in our lab has sought to contribute to our knowledge of functional network organization and dynamics. In a recently published study (Dixon et al. 2017), we utilized dynamic functional connectivity and graph theoretical network neuroscience techniques to demonstrate that the default network (DN) and dorsal attention network (DAN) exhibit variable connectivity across a number of contexts. Our use of these advanced analyses allowed us to obtain evidence against the hitherto strongly held notion that these networks had an intrinsically negative relationship. In addition, we currently have a manuscript that is being revised for resubmission at PNAS (Dixon et al., PNAS) documenting the findings of a study that employed a combination of static and dynamic FC, graph theoretic analyses, and machine learning to precisely characterize the functional organization of the frontoparietal control network and its differential dynamic relationships with the DN and DAN.