Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
April 14, 2026
Meichao Zhang, Casey Paquola, Katya Krieger-Redwood et al.
Everyday cognition depends on the brain's capacity to shift between sensing the external world and constructing it from memory. To achieve this, large-scale cortical systems must flexibly integrate incoming sensory signals with internally generated representations. Here, we show that this flexibility is reflected in the macroscale architecture of the default mode network (DMN). Using convergent...
iScience
February 2, 2021
Jonathan Smallwood, Adam Turnbull, Hao-ting Wang et al.
130 citations
A core goal in cognitive neuroscience is identifying the physical substrates of the patterns of thought that occupy our daily lives. Contemporary views suggest that the landscape of ongoing experience is heterogeneous and can be influenced by features of both the person and the context. This perspective piece considers recent work that explicitly accounts for both the heterogeneity of the...
Nature Communications
August 23, 2019
Adam Turnbull, Hao-ting Wang, Charlotte Murphy et al.
197 citations
When environments lack compelling goals, humans often let their minds wander to thoughts with greater personal relevance; however, we currently do not understand how this context-dependent prioritisation process operates. Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) maintains goal representations in a context-dependent manner. Here, we show this region is involved in prioritising off-task thought in...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
August 27, 2018
Mladen Sormaz, Charlotte Murphy, Hao-ting Wang et al.
291 citations
Regions of transmodal cortex, in particular the default mode network (DMN), have historically been argued to serve functions unrelated to task performance, in part because of associations with naturally occurring periods of off-task thought. In contrast, contemporary views of the DMN suggest it plays an integrative role in cognition that emerges from its location at the top of a cortical...
Neuroimage
January 12, 2018
Charlotte Murphy, Elizabeth Jefferies, Shirley-Ann Rueschemeyer et al.
288 citations
The default mode network supports a variety of mental operations such as semantic processing, episodic memory retrieval, mental time travel and mind-wandering, yet the commonalities between these functions remains unclear. One possibility is that this system supports cognition that is independent of the immediate environment; alternatively or additionally, it might support higher-order...