The Human Claustrum Activates Across Multiple Cognitive Control 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 with widespread cortical connections, is proposed to activate with cognitive load to support cortical network demands across cognitive domains. With this model in mind, we examined the claustrum signal within a dataset (n = 55) that includes functional MRI (fMRI) of healthy participants engaged in four well-established cognitive control 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 times of increased cognitive demand, and coinciding with task-positive cortical network activations. These findings demonstrate claustrum activation across multiple cognitive control tasks and potentially pave the way for new insights into how cognitive processes are compromised in neuropsychiatric disorders.

Keywords: attention; claustrum; cognitive control; cortical networks; functional neuroimaging; working memory.