Interactions between frontal and parietal cortex during cognitive control tasks: a combination of fMRI, single unit recordings and optogenetics.

To accomplish virtually any task, we rely on cognitive control in our brain, which includes memory, attention, planning, reasoning, decision making etc. To improve our understanding of the neuronal mechanisms underlying such processes, we aim to investigate the behavioral and functional impact of very short and precise interruptions of activity in key nodes of the brain’s network involved in cognitive control processes. First, we will use high resolution functional imaging to map the brain network activated during a cognitive control task. Guided by these functional maps, we will target electrophysiological recordings to characterize the neuronal response (spikes and LFPs) properties and interactions between simultaneously recorded neurons in different nodes/areas of the task-driven networks. Next, to unravel the importance of these brain areas in cognitive control, we will measure the subject’s performance difference when highly novel light-induced reversible perturbation method (optogenetics) is employed to shortly inactivate one of these regions. In summary, we will study causal interactions across important nodes of cognitive control brain networks and investigate how altered activity is causally related to behavioral performance and functional network changes at different spatio-temporal scales.