Fronto-cerebellar connectivity mediating cognitive processing speed

Processing speed is an important construct in understanding cognition. This study was aimed to control task specificity for the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive processing speed. Forty young adult subjects performed attention tasks of two modalities (auditory and visual) levels rules (compatible incompatible). Block-design fMRI captured BOLD signals during tasks. Thirteen regions interest were defined with reference publicly available activation maps Cognitive derived from reaction times, which yielded six sets connectivity measures. Mixed-effect LASSO regression revealed significant paths suggestive a cerebello-frontal network predicting Among them, three are long range (two fronto-cerebellar, one cerebello-frontal), short (fronto-frontal, cerebello-cerebellar, cerebello-thalamic). The long-range connections likely relate control, short-range rule-based stimulus-response processes. suggests that automaticity, acting on interplaying effortful top–down attentional accounts