Intrinsic effective connectivity as the basis of functional localization in the cortex

Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre 

How do inter-areal connections shape brain function? One theoretical framework posits that intrinsic (i.e., stimulus-independent) inter-areal connectivity patterns, or a region's connectivity receptive field (CRF), is as a major determinant of its functional localization (Passingham et al., 2002). In our previous study (Oh et al., 2024), we introduced the integrated effective connectivity (iEC) – a biologically grounded measure that reliably estimates directed intrinsic connectivity using empirical resting-state fMRI data. Here, we found that CRFs derived from task-free iEC (i) predicts the task tuning curves of diverse cognitive tasks in an independent task dataset, (ii) identifies functionally localized clusters of brain regions, and (iii) systematically vary along the cytoarchitectural hierarchy.