McGovern Institute Special Seminar with Moataz Assem

Date: Monday, August 31, 2026
Time: 12:00 – 1:00 pm
Location: Building 46, Seminar Room 3189

Talk Title: Interdigitated domain-general and domain-specific fine-grained patches: a new view of cognitive control in the human brain

Abstract:

Three decades of brain imaging consistently link the organization of thought and behavior to circumscribed regions within the association cortices, commonly known as domain-general or multiple-demand (MD) regions. However, the imprecision of classical fMRI has impeded our understanding of how MD regions interact with distributed brain circuits. To address this, we used the high-resolution multimodal 3T and 7T MRI approaches of the Human Connectome Project to scan participants performing 12 diverse cognitive tasks. At the individual level, different cognitive demands converge within 9 domain-general territories, tightly circumscribed within frontal, parietal and temporal cortices, extending to specific subcortical and cerebellar structures, suggesting a brain wide system in cognitive control. Each task shows a unique topography, with fine activation gradients shifted toward adjacent resting-state networks, and the strongest responses arising at neurobiologically defined network borders where information may be intensively exchanged. At a finer scale, we reveal focal category-biased patches immediately adjacent to MD regions representing biases for faces, places, tools, body parts, geometric shapes, letters, and digits. In single subjects, activations often fragment into small “dots”, possibly reflecting millimeter-scale columnar units seen in invasive animal studies. These findings reveal a recurring motif in which domain-specific and domain-general circuits are interdigitated at a fine spatial scale. Together, these results suggest a novel framework whereby partially specialized networks collaborate with neighboring MD areas to generate the momentary contents of thought.