Resting-state functional connectivity
The task-free imaging method behind the wiki’s intrinsic-network constructs — the default-mode, salience, and executive/frontoparietal networks are all defined by the correlation structure of spontaneous BOLD fluctuations that this method measures. Given its own page because it is used across several studies here and had been referenced without one.
Why it recurs in this wiki
Three uses, three purposes:
- Clinical, because it needs no task. Farb et al. (2012) use it in frontotemporal dementia — a population where task compliance is unreliable and some patients are too aphasic for standard testing — to show frontolimbic disconnection plus prefrontal hyperconnectivity (“prefrontal isolation”). The task-free property is the whole reason the study is possible.
- To characterize spontaneous thought. Banellis et al. (2026) map the intrinsic connectivity supporting body-oriented mind-wandering, finding a thalamus/striatum–somatomotor mode distinct from the DMN.
- As a treatment target. Weng et al. (2021) frame meditation as engaging interoception/salience networks and disengaging the DMN — network changes stated in the vocabulary of resting-state connectivity.
The analytic toolkit, briefly
The Farb (2012) paper is a compact tour of the method’s variants, run together for convergence: group ICA (data-driven network maps), fALFF (fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation — local low-frequency power), REHO (regional homogeneity — local coherence with neighbouring voxels), seed-based univariate connectivity, and PLS as a multivariate replication. A methodological lesson recorded there: the local metrics (fALFF/REHO) flagged a right anterior-insula abnormality that the whole-brain ICA missed — so the choice of analysis, not just the data, determines what is found.