The human brain processes enormous amounts of information continuously, even during familiar tasks like driving, which requires several mental tasks at once. The brain must remember the route, recall how to control the vehicle, and respond to unexpected developments such as a road closure or shifting traffic conditions.
A brain network known as the frontoparietal cortex plays a major role in managing this flow of information, receiving signals from throughout the brain, determining which information is most important, and helping coordinate the appropriate response.
University of Iowa researchers offer a detailed look at how this system works when people face uncertainty while making decisions. The findings show how the frontoparietal cortex helps organize information and coordinate responses involving both the brain and the body.
Using experiments that combined computational modeling with brain imaging, the scientists found that the frontoparietal cortex does not communicate with the rest of the brain in a fixed way. Instead, its connections shift according to the type of information required during different stages of a decision.
“Our study shows in more detail how the frontoparietal cortex operates — what kind of information it extracts from other systems and how it uses its connectivity pattern to integrate information that is coming in from different areas of the brain,” says Kai Hwang, associate professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and the study’s corresponding author.
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Scientists have long recognized the frontoparietal cortex as an important part of decision making, with its role resembling that of an air traffic controller overseeing a crowded airport. It continually receives information from other brain regions, but it does more than simply collect those signals.
Depending on the situation, it filters out some information while giving greater attention to signals that are more relevant. In a study published in 2025, Hwang and his colleagues found that the frontoparietal cortex develops an ongoing high-level summary of information arriving from elsewhere in the brain.
The new research extended those findings by examining how adaptable the frontoparietal cortex is. Specifically, the team wanted to understand how its interactions with other brain regions change as the demands of a problem or situation change.
To investigate this, the researchers recruited 38 participants between ages 18 and 35, who learned connections between different combinations of colors, faces, and scenes and particular responses. The team later altered the learned pairings, introducing uncertainty into the task.
This allowed the scientists to observe how the frontoparietal cortex changed its connections with other brain systems as participants tried to determine what had happened. The team combined behavioral data from the experiments with functional MRI scans, developing a computational model that separated signals coming from different areas of the brain.
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The results suggest that challenging decisions are not handled simply by increasing activity within this network. Instead, the frontoparietal cortex appears to adjust which brain regions it communicates with according to the information needed at that particular moment.
This adaptability is similar to how other complex systems, like neural networks, reorganize themselves in response to new information or changing conditions.
The findings could eventually contribute to research on psychiatric disorders that make it harder for people to adjust their behavior when circumstances change, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
“These are situations where people struggle with regulating their behavior. That, to me, is an integration problem. If that integration function is not working properly, then that could very likely mean they didn’t use the right context to regulate their behavior,” Hwang says.
The study, “Frontoparietal hub connectivity integrates information from multiple sources,” was published in the Journal of Neuroscience. Funding for the research came from the National Institute of Mental Health and the Iowa Neuroscience Institute.
