Clustered Spontaneous Coordinated Network Events Contribute to Functional Connectivity

Thomas Allan¹, Matthew J. Brookes¹, Susan T. Francis¹, Penelope A. Gowland¹

The origins of functional connectivity are unknown but contributions from spontaneous neural events may have an effect of typical measures of functional connectivity. These spontaneous events, whether they are externally stimulated or internally driven can evoke bilateral responses in multiple network nodes. Here we show that spontaneous BOLD events, detected using paradigm free mapping, have a significant contribution to functional connectivity on a short window correlation analysis and that these events are clustered in space and do not require the entire network to perform a task, highlighting substructures within large scale networks.