Predicting an individual's Dorsal Attention Network activity from functional connectivity fingerprints.

The cortical Dorsal Attention Network (DAN) is a set of parietal and frontal regions that support a wide variety of attentionally demanding tasks. While attentional deployment reliably drives DAN activity across subjects, there is a large degree of variation in the activation pattern in individual subjects. We hypothesize that a subjects own idiosyncratic pattern of cortical DAN activity can be predicted from that subjects own unique pattern of functional connectivity. By modeling task activation as a function of whole-brain connectivity patterns, we are able to define the connectivity fingerprints for the frontal and parietal DAN, and use it to predict a subject's characteristic DAN activation pattern with high accuracy. These predictions outperform the standard group-average benchmark, and predict a subject's own activation pattern above and beyond predictions from another subject's connectivity pattern. Thus, an individuals distinctive connectivity pattern accounts for substantial variance in DAN functional responses. Lastly, we show that the set of connections that predict cortical DAN responses, the frontal and parietal DAN connectivity fingerprints, is predominantly composed of other coactive regions, including regions outside of the DAN including occipital and temporal visual cortices. These connectivity fingerprints represent defining computational characteristics of the DAN, delineating which voxels are, or are not capable of exerting top-down attentional bias to other regions of the brain.