Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
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...
Journal of Neuroscience
April 8, 2024
Ximing Shao, Katya Krieger-Redwood, Meichao Zhang et al.
20 citations
The default mode network (DMN) typically deactivates to external tasks, yet supports semantic cognition. It comprises medial temporal (MT), core, and frontotemporal (FT) subsystems, but its functional organization is unclear: the requirement for perceptual coupling versus decoupling, input modality (visual/verbal), type of information (social/spatial), and control demands all potentially affect...
bioRxiv
October 2, 2023
Nicholas Souter, Antonia De Freitas, Meichao Zhang et al.
preprint
The default mode network (DMN) lies towards the heteromodal end of the principal gradient of intrinsic connectivity, maximally separated from sensory-motor cortex. It supports memory-based cognition, including the capacity to retrieve conceptual and evaluative information from sensory inputs, and to generate meaningful states internally; however, the functional organisation of DMN that can...
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...
Scientific Reports
November 7, 2019
Meichao Zhang, Nicola Savill, Daniel S. Margulies et al.
48 citations
Often, as we read, we find ourselves thinking about something other than the text; this tendency to mind-wander is linked to poor comprehension and reduced subsequent memory for texts. Contemporary accounts argue that periods of off-task thought are related to the tendency for attention to be decoupled from external input. We used fMRI to understand the neural processes that underpin this...