The Time Varying Networks of the Interoceptive Attention and Rest

Abstract

Focused attention to spontaneous sensations is a phenomenon that demands interoceptive abilities and a dynamic character of attentive processes. The lack of its control has been linked to neuropsychiatric disorders, such as illness-anxiety disorder. Regulatory strategies, like focused attention meditation, may enhance the ability to control attention particularly to body sensations, which can be reflected on functional neuroanatomy. Adopting a systems-level approach, we aimed at estimating the recurring fMRI functional connectivity (FC) patterns between regions of the dorsal attention network, default mode network, and frontoparietal network during 20 minutes of an attentional task to spontaneous sensations (Task), and at rest, before (Pre-task rs) and after the task (Post-task rs), in fifteen experienced meditators. Dynamic functional connectivity analysis was performed using sliding windows and k-means clustering on the grouped data finding five FC patterns. In both rest conditions the subjects remain longer in a low connectivity state, in contrast, during the task a higher proportion of time spent in complex organization states was preferred. Moreover, an impact over the post-task rs FC was observed as an effect of the preceding interoceptive task performance, with this remaining effect probably taking an active role in the learning process linked to cognitive training.