An fMRI Study Using a Combined Task of Interval Discrimination and Oddball Could Reveal Common Brain Circuits of Cognitive Change

Recent functional neuroimaging studies suggest that the brain networks responsible for time processing are involved during other cognitive processes, leading to a hypothesis that time-related processing is needed to perform a range of tasks across various cognitive functions. To examine this hypothesis, we analyze whether, in healthy subjects, the brain structures activated or deactivated during performance of timing and oddball-detection type tasks coincide. To this end, we conducted two independent signed differential mapping (SDM) meta-analyses of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies assessing the cerebral generators of the responses elicited by tasks based on timing and oddball-detection paradigms. Finally, we undertook a multimodal meta-analysis to detect brain regions common to the findings of the two previous meta-analyses. We found that healthy subjects showed significant activation in cortical areas related to timing and salience networks. The patterns of activation and deactivation corresponding to each task type partially coincided. We hypothesize that there exists a time and change-detection network that serves as a common underlying resource used in a broad range of cognitive processes.