Cognition Workshop 3/3: Colleen Wohlrab & Andrew Stier

Competing Motivational Processes: Autonomic Correlates and Behavioral Output
Colleen Wohlrab

An organism’s willingness to expend energy is highly malleable and responsive to both internal and environmental perturbations. Motivation promotes physiological and behavioral prioritization driven by current needs. Goals associated with motivational states support processes that benefit daily life as well as long-term survival. Organisms are motivated by an expansive set of needs, ranging from balancing low-level metabolic processes to higher-order maintenance of social systems. Often as one motivation increases, organisms will de-prioritize other motivational processes and shift resources towards behavioral and physiological processes associated with current needs. With a focus on hunger, fatigue, and loneliness I will discuss how autonomic physiology can inform our understanding of how organisms prioritize behavior and survive in ever-changing environments.

Andrew Stier

Scale-free brain activity occurs when a neural time-series has a high degree of self-similarity in the temporal domain, resulting in more smooth-looking fluctuations. Recent findings from human neuroimaging studies suggest that measures of scale-free brain activity can indicate the “health” of complex neural networks. Among these findings is evidence that less scale-free signals are associated with harder tasks, more novel tasks, poorer performance, increased age, and greater symptoms across a broad range of psychopathologies.

We build on this work and examine covariance between psychopathology and patterns of fMRI-based scale-free brain activity in 1,839 adolescents (9-10 years old) during a working memory task. In this study we use the Hurst exponent to measure the degree to which an individual fMRI BOLD time-series is scale-free. We find a hurst-psychopathology gradient which associates less scale-free brains with higher levels of psychopathology and worse working memory performance. This is in line with the expectations of previous research on hurst and psychopathology. We additionally ask how similar the spatial distribution of this gradient map is to spatial patterns of activations associated with psychological and cognitive terms. We find that the hurst-psychopathology gradient is positively correlated to terms related to task-specific cognition and negatively correlated to terms related to cue-response. This suggests that individuals with higher levels of psychopathology “look” like they are engaged more in task specific processing despite having worse performance. In contrast individuals with lower levels of psychopathology “look” like they are less engaged in task-specific processing despite having better performance.