Executive and Attentional Resting-State Hubs of the Human Cortical Connectome Revealed by a Causal Discovery Method for Data-Driven Effective Connectivity Analysis

We introduce a data-driven causal discovery method (Greedy Adjacencies and Non-Gaussian Orientations; GANGO) for calculating a "causal connectome" of directed connectivity from resting-state fMRI data and characterizing hubs of directed information transfer across the human cortex. Prominent hubs of the causal connectome were situated in attentional (dorsal attention) and executive (frontoparietal and cingulo-opercular) networks. These hub networks had distinctly different connectivity profiles. Attentional networks shared incoming connections with sensory regions and outgoing connections with higher cognitive networks, while executive networks primarily connected to other higher cognitive networks and had a high degree of bidirected connectivity. Virtual lesion analyses accentuated these findings, demonstrating that attentional and executive hubs are points of critical vulnerability in the human causal connectome. These data highlight the central role of attention and executive control networks in the human cortical connectome and set the stage for future applications of data-driven causal ("effective") connectivity analysis in psychiatry.