Recent evidence suggests that, in the absence of a specific task, spontaneous brain activity patterns and connectivity within the visual and motor cortices respectively encode natural stimuli and actions. These “resting” activity patterns may underlie the maintenance and consolidation (repetition) of informational states that encode ecological stimuli and behaviors. In this study, we investigated whether repetition patterns occur during resting-state activity in the associative cortex, divided into higher-order cognitive networks not directly involved in the processing of sensory inputs or motor outputs. Fifteen participants (7 females) performed four hand movements during an fMRI study. Three movements were ecological, while the fourth movement, used as a control, was less ecological. Before and after the task scans, we acquired resting-state fMRI scans. The analysis examined whether multivertex task-activation patterns for the four movements, computed on the cortical surface across different brain networks, resembled spontaneous resting-state activity patterns. For each movement, we computed a vector of r values indicating the strength of the similarity between the average task-activation pattern and frame-by-frame resting-state activity patterns. We then calculated a cumulative distribution function of r² values and used the 90th percentile cut-off value for comparison. In the dorsal attention network, resting-state activity patterns were more likely to match task patterns for ecological movements than for the control movement. Conversely, in the ventral attention network, resting–task correlations were more likely for the less ecological movements. These findings show that spontaneous activity patterns within human attention networks encode hand movements.
SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: fMRI indirectly measures neural activity in a non-invasive manner. Resting-state (spontaneous) fMRI signals recorded in the absence of a task resemble task-evoked signals in both topography and inter-regional (functional) connectivity. However, the function of spontaneous brain activity remains unknown. We recently demonstrated that spatial activity patterns evoked by visual and motor tasks in the visual and motor cortices, respectively, also occur at rest in the absence of stimulus or response. Here, we show that activity patterns related to hand movements recur at rest within frontoparietal regions of the human attention system. These findings suggest that spontaneous activity in the human cortex may mediate the maintenance and consolidation of informational states encoding ecological stimuli and behaviors.
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