ERC Starting Grant: Mapping Cortical Communication Underlying Executive Function

Romy Lorenz secures five-year grant to study the brain's frontoparietal network

• Research funding: Romy Lorenz is awarded 1.5 million euros over five years for her project “FRUITION”.
• Cutting-edge imaging methods: Investigation of how the brain’s frontoparietal network enables planning, reasoning, and flexible thinking.
• Novel multimodal approach: Tracking the same volunteers across multiple sessions to capture network dynamics.
• Potential clinical applications: Findings could inform more precise treatments for neurological and psychiatric conditions.

Humans are unique in our ability to plan ahead, reason through a problem and adapt flexibly to a changing world. These executive function skills depend critically on a brain network called the frontoparietal network.

Despite decades of research, the precise mechanisms by which the frontoparietal network carries out its functions remain incompletely understood. Current non-invasive brain-imaging methods cannot reveal how information flows through the brain, so much of what we know about its detailed mechanisms comes from animal studies. Yet translating these findings to humans is far from straightforward.

This is the gap Romy Lorenz's project, FRUITION, sets out to close. Lorenz, who is based at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, has been awarded a five-year ERC Starting Grant to pursue it. Her approach bridges this divide by using ultra-high field fMRI, magnetic resonance imaging with a field strength well above what is used in clinical settings. This achieves spatial resolution fine enough to image the brain's cortical layers, thin sheets of tissue whose activity reveals the direction signals are traveling in, allowing to trace information flow in the living human brain. “FRUITION maps how information is processed and exchanged across different parts of the frontoparietal cortex and examines how this shapes behavior,” Lorenz summarizes her project. “It will thus provide new insights into how the frontoparietal network supports human cognition.”

Tracking the same brains across dozens of sessions

The project integrates several research tools to track frontoparietal network activity in the living human brain. Crucially, because this network varies markedly from person to person, the team will not combine single measurements across many different people, as is typically done. Instead, they will apply the full battery of methods to the same small group of volunteers across dozens of sessions. This will build an unprecedented density of multimodal data within each individual and enable a level of insight into frontoparietal network dynamics that has not been possible before.

FRUITION is especially relevant since the frontoparietal network is frequently disrupted in neurological and psychiatric conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, ADHD, and schizophrenia. Mapping the information flow between different subregions of the frontoparietal network could help clarify what goes wrong in each condition and inform more targeted therapeutic approaches.

ERC Starting Grants are awarded by the European Research Council. These highly coveted fellowships support excellent early-career researchers who show potential to become leaders in their fields.