The human claustrum activates across multiple cognitive tasks

Abstract

Cognitive control, the ability to manage information during purposeful actions, is crucial for everyday functioning and can become impaired in a variety of neuropsychiatric disorders. The claustrum, a subcortical brain structure, has recently been implicated in functional mechanisms underlying cognitive control. A current theory on the claustrums function, the Network Instantiation in Cognitive Control (NICC) model, proposes that the claustrum acts as a cortical network hub synchronizing distant parts of the brain to optimize task performance across cognitive domains. Testing this in this study, we examined the claustrum signal within a dataset (n = 55) that includes functional MRI (fMRI) of healthy participants engaged in four well-established cognitive tasks: the Stroop task, AX-continuous performance task (AX-CPT), cued task-switching, and Sternberg working memory task. Bilateral claustrum activation was observed during certain conditions and trial phases of all four tasks, particularly during active use of cognitive control, and coinciding with task-positive cortical network activations. These findings provide further support for the NICC model of claustrum function, demonstrating claustrum activation across multiple cognitive tasks, and potentially paving the way for new insights into how cognitive processes can become compromised in neuropsychiatric disorders.