Whole-Brain Hypothesized Anatomical and Temporal Patterns of Task-General Brain Modes in the Multimodal Negative Affect Task

Background: Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) investigations of pain processing, affective evaluation, and cognitive modulation have been central to cognitive neuroscience for several decades. Drawing on a growing body of fMRI studies, we characterized two task-general brain modes that emerged during the Multimodal Negative Affect Task (MNAT) in terms of their anatomical and temporal properties.Task: The MNAT integrates somatic pain stimulation, vicarious pain observation, and a cognitive task within a unified event-related design, comprising three conditions: (1) thermal somatic stimulation, (2) short video clips depicting others experiencing pain (vicarious condition), and (3) a cognitive mental rotation task.Hypotheses: The MNAT is hypothesized to engage two brain cognitive modes: the Auditory Attention for Response (AAR), characterized by spatial activation in middle frontal gyrus, anterior cingulate cortex, supramarginal gyrus, and supplementary motor areas, and Default Mode B (DMB), characterized by activation in precuneus, medial prefrontal cortex, and lateral temporal regions. Specifically, AAR is expected to exhibit transient activation peaks during somatic pain stimulus presentation while remaining near baseline during vicarious pain conditions. DMB is predicted to deactivate during somatic pain trials but activate during vicarious pain conditions.Conclusions: Within the MNAT paradigm, AAR and DMB are expected to emerge as spatially and temporally distinct patterns of task-induced BOLD activity. fMRI-Constrained Principal Component Analysis (fMRI-CPCA) will be used to test these hypotheses by isolating anatomically coherent modes and characterizing their task-related temporal dynamics. Although examined here within MNAT, these modes are not specific to this task. Rather, they are part of a broader set of task-general functional brain modes observed across multiple cognitive tasks. This approach may provide insight into the neural mechanisms underlying pain perception and vicarious pain processing.