Savannah L. Cookson, Eliot Hazeltine, Eric H. Schumacher

A partially informative cue presented before a stimulus can facilitate the production of the response. Prior information about an upcoming target can increase brain activity in both stimulus (c.f., Desimone & Duncan, 1995) and response (c.f., Leuthold et al., 1996) processing regions; however, it is unclear how the representation of the task might influence the recruitment of this network of task-relevant regions. In the current experiment, we employed an event-related fMRI design with a response cuing procedure to investigate whether S-R pairings jointly influence activity in stimulus- and response-specific processing areas during the presentation of a cue. Participants learned S-R mappings in which pictures of faces and places were paired with either left or right hand finger responses. On some trials, a cue provided partial information about the upcoming trial (e.g., that the trial would involve a face or place stimuli or a left or right hand response). Importantly, because different stimulus types were associated with each hand, any informative cue implicitly indicated both a stimulus type and response hand, allowing participants to represent the task as two distinct subtasks. Region-of-interest analyses at the cue event demonstrated a biasing of response processing regions for both stimulus- and response-related cues, as well as increased connectivity with the associated stimulus-processing regions. The results suggest that the cue results in the recruitment of just the task-relevant subnetwork on each trial.