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Adaptive Thalamocortical Gating Reconfigures Low-Dimensional Connectivity Motifs to Support Cognitive Flexibility

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 7, 2026, 3:00 – 5:00 pm PST, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Shannon Stokes¹ (sestokes@uiowa.edu), Stephanie Leach¹, Xitong Chen¹, Kai Hwang¹; ¹University of Iowa

Flexible cognition has been hypothesized to be supported by dynamic routing information processing across large-scale brain networks. The thalamus is a known central, integrative hub for functional brain networks in humans; however, it is unclear how it contributes to network reconfiguration. To investigate its dynamic functional connectivity, we developed and validated a task-related functional connectivity method to be able to reliably capture how task manipulations modulate thalamocortical functional connectivity. We then decomposed the estimated functional connectivity matrices into low-dimensional subspaces and discovered a set of low-dimensional thalamocortical functional connectivity motifs that are shared across different task conditions. We further found that the thalamus implements adaptive gating, dynamically reweighting thalamocortical functional connectivity within stable, low-dimensional communication backbone motifs. Across a resting-state and two independent cognitive control fMRI datasets, this architecture supports flexible behavior by remapping motif couplings rather than forming new functional networks. We found common and distinct modulation profiles for several cognitive control operations including processing the uncertainty of inputs, encoding, predication error, and enable contextually driven task-switching. Finally, we characterized these motif modulations as two complementary network operations: gain modulation, which scales the strength of existing thalamocortical motifs, and recoupling, which reconfigures their coupling structure. We found distinct thalamic activity structure that is involved in these two operations in the anterior, medial, and posterior medial thalamic nuclei. Together, these results suggest that the thalamus supports flexible cognition by adaptively gating a shared, low-rank communication backbone, allowing task-specific reconfiguration for flexible cognition.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Other