The organization of the human cerebral cortex estimated by intrinsic functional connectivity¶
Why this mattered¶
This paper mattered because it turned resting-state fMRI from a promising observation into a practical atlas-building method for the human cortex. Earlier work had shown that spontaneous activity correlations recapitulate known systems, but Yeo et al. used a very large sample for the time, surface-based alignment, clustering, and replication to derive stable whole-cortex network parcellations. The resulting 7- and 17-network descriptions made it possible to speak about the cortex not only as a set of anatomical lobes or task-activated regions, but as an organized landscape of intrinsic functional systems, with sensory-motor cortex showing smooth topographic structure and association cortex showing sharper boundaries among distributed networks.
The paradigm shift was especially important for association cortex. The paper helped establish that regions involved in cognition are not arranged simply as a single serial hierarchy extending outward from sensory areas. Instead, neighboring prefrontal, parietal, temporal, and medial cortical zones can belong to distinct, interdigitated large-scale networks, including systems later commonly discussed as default, control, dorsal attention, ventral attention/salience, limbic, visual, and somatomotor networks. This gave researchers a shared coordinate system for studying individual regions in relation to whole-brain circuits, and it made network membership a central explanatory variable in cognitive neuroscience.
Afterward, the Yeo parcellation became a standard reference for human connectomics, task-fMRI interpretation, neurology, psychiatry, and developmental neuroscience. It helped enable later work linking cortical networks to cognitive specialization, evolutionary expansion of association cortex, gradients of cortical organization, individual differences, and disease-related network disruption. Its influence came less from a single mechanistic claim than from making large-scale cortical network organization measurable, replicable, and usable as infrastructure for subsequent discoveries.
Abstract¶
Information processing in the cerebral cortex involves interactions among distributed areas. Anatomical connectivity suggests that certain areas form local hierarchical relations such as within the visual system. Other connectivity patterns, particularly among association areas, suggest the presence of large-scale circuits without clear hierarchical relations. In this study the organization of networks in the human cerebrum was explored using resting-state functional connectivity MRI. Data from 1,000 subjects were registered using surface-based alignment. A clustering approach was employed to identify and replicate networks of functionally coupled regions across the cerebral cortex. The results revealed local networks confined to sensory and motor cortices as well as distributed networks of association regions. Within the sensory and motor cortices, functional connectivity followed topographic representations across adjacent areas. In association cortex, the connectivity patterns often showed abrupt transitions between network boundaries. Focused analyses were performed to better understand properties of network connectivity. A canonical sensory-motor pathway involving primary visual area, putative middle temporal area complex (MT+), lateral intraparietal area, and frontal eye field was analyzed to explore how interactions might arise within and between networks. Results showed that adjacent regions of the MT+ complex demonstrate differential connectivity consistent with a hierarchical pathway that spans networks. The functional connectivity of parietal and prefrontal association cortices was next explored. Distinct connectivity profiles of neighboring regions suggest they participate in distributed networks that, while showing evidence for interactions, are embedded within largely parallel, interdigitated circuits. We conclude by discussing the organization of these large-scale cerebral networks in relation to monkey anatomy and their potential evolutionary expansion in humans to support cognition.
Related¶
- cite → Receptive fields, binocular interaction and functional architecture in the cat's visual cortex — The cortical connectivity paper relates intrinsic functional organization to the classic columnar functional architecture discovered in cat visual cortex.
- enables ← Receptive fields, binocular interaction and functional architecture in the cat's visual cortex — Hubel and Wiesel's cortical maps of receptive-field organization enabled later functional-connectivity work to interpret correlated activity as evidence of large-scale cortical organization.