Flexible information coding in frontoparietal cortex across the functional stages of cognitive processing.

Neural activity in frontoparietal cortex shows overlap across cognitive domains and has been proposed to reflect flexible information processing according to current task demands (Dosenbach et al., 2007; Duncan, 2001). However, a strong assertion of flexibility requires investigating activity across stages of cognitive processing. The current study assessed neural activity in Multiple Demand (MD) regions across the stages of processing that form the core of long-standing cognitive models (Welford, 1952). Specifically, many complex tasks share a comparable structure of subsequent operations: target selection, stimulus-response (SR) mapping, and response execution. We independently manipulated the difficulty of target selection and SR mapping in identical stimulus displays and assessed changes in frontoparietal activity with increased demands in either stage. The results confirmed flexibility in MD regions, with enhanced information representation during difficult target selection as well as SR mapping. Additionally, anterior insula (AI) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) showed preferential representation of SR stage information, whereas the medial frontal gyrus (MFG) and inferior parietal sulcus (IPS) showed preferential representation of target selection-stage information. Together these results suggest that MD regions dynamically alter the information they represent with changing task demands. This is the first study to demonstrate that MD regions support flexible goal- directed cognition across multiple processing stages. At the same time we show a preference for the representation of information from a specific processing stage in a subset of MD regions.