Flexible adaptation of task-positive brain networks predicts efficiency of evidence accumulation

Abstract

Abstract Efficiency of evidence accumulation (EEA), an individual’s ability to selectively gather goal-relevant information to make adaptive choices, is thought to be a key neurocomputational mechanism associated with cognitive functioning and transdiagnostic risk for psychopathology. However, the neural basis of individual differences in EEA is poorly understood, especially regarding the role of largescale brain network dynamics. We leverage data from 5198 participants from the Human Connectome Project and Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study to demonstrate a strong association between EEA and flexible adaptation to cognitive demand in the “task-positive” frontoparietal and dorsal attention networks. Notably, individuals with higher EEA displayed divergent task-positive network activation across n-back task conditions: higher activation under high cognitive demand (2-back) and lower activation under low demand (0-back). These findings suggest that brain networks’ flexible adaptation to cognitive demands is a key neural underpinning of EEA.