Where color rests: Spontaneous brain activity of bilateral fusiform and lingual regions predicts object color knowledge performance

Abstract

Knowledge of the physical attributes of objects is commonly assumed to be distributed near their respective modality-specific brain regions. The exact neural correlates for such knowledge, especially how it is maintained in the resting state, are largely unknown. In the current study, we explored the intrinsic neural basis related to a specific type of object knowledge — color — by investigating the relationship between spontaneous brain activity and color knowledge behavioral performance. We correlated the regional amplitude of spontaneous low-frequency fluctuations (ALFF, a resting-state fMRI parameter) with healthy participants' performance on two object color knowledge tasks (object color verification and color attribute judgment). We found that ALFF in bilateral lingual and fusiform gyri and right inferior occipital gyrus reliably predicted participants' color knowledge performance (correlation coefficients = 0.55–0.70), and that calcarine cortex showed a similar trend, although less stable. Furthermore, the ALFF-behavior correlations for other types of object knowledge (i.e. form, motion and sound) in these regions were minimal and significantly lower than those for color knowledge, suggesting that the effects in the observed regions were not merely due to general object processing. Furthermore, we showed that functional connectivity strengths of the lingual/fusiform and inferior occipital regions are significantly associated with color knowledge performance, indicating that they work as a network to support color knowledge processing or the acquisition of such knowledge. Our findings show the critical role of ventral medial occipito-temporal regions in processing or acquiring color knowledge and highlight the behavioral significance of spontaneous brain activity in the resting state.