Anterior insular cortex is a bottleneck of cognitive control
2019-07-15
Here, we used a perceptual decision-making task with conditions of high cognitive load to challenge the CCN and to assess the CCC in a functional magnetic resonance imaging study.
These findings suggest that the AIC, as a critical hub in the CCN, is a bottleneck of cognitive control.
We found that the activation of the right anterior insular cortex (AIC) of the CCN increased monotonically as a function of cognitive load, reached its plateau early, and showed a significant correlation to the CCC. In a subsequent study of patients with unilateral lesions of the AIC, we found that lesions of the AIC were associated with a significant impairment of the CCC. Simulated lesions of the AIC resulted in a reduction of the global efficiency of the CCN in a network analysis.