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Poster A144 in Poster Session A - Tuesday, August 6, 2024, 4:15 – 6:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Bridging multitask representational geometry and intrinsic connectivity in the human brain
Lakshman Chakravarthula1, Alexandros Tzalavras1, Takuya Ito2, Michael Cole1; 1Rutgers University, 2IBM Research
Representational geometry and connectivity-based studies offer complementary insights into neural information processing, but it is unclear how representations and networks interact to generate neural information. Using a multi-task fMRI dataset, we investigate the role of intrinsic connectivity in shaping diverse representational geometries across the human cortex. Activity flow modeling, which generates neural activity based on connectivity-weighted propagation from other regions, successfully recreated similarity structure and a compression-then-expansion pattern of task representation dimensionality. We introduce a novel measure, convergence, quantifying the degree to which connectivity converges onto target regions. As hypothesized, convergence corresponded with compression of representations and helped explain the observed compression-then-expansion pattern of task representation dimensionality along the cortical hierarchy. These results underscore the generative role of intrinsic connectivity in sculpting representational geometries and suggest that structured connectivity properties, such as convergence, contribute to representational transformations. By bridging representational geometry and connectivity-based frameworks, this work offers a more unified understanding of neural information processing and the computational relevance of brain architecture.
Keywords: representational geometry functional connectivity activity flow modeling fMRI