What’s in a Hub?—Representing Identity in Language and Mathematics

Hubs emerge in structural and resting state network analysis as areas highly connected to other parts of the brain and have been shown to respond to several task domains in functional imaging studies. A cognitive explanation for this multi-functionality is still wanting. We propose, that hubs subserve domain-general meta-cognitive functions, relevant to a variety of domain-specific networks and test this hypothesis for the example of processing explicit identity information. To isolate this meta-cognitive function from the processing of domain-specific context, we investigate the overlapping activations to linguistic identity processes (e.g. Mr. Dietrich is the dentist) on the one hand and numerical identity processes (e.g. do “3 × 8” and “36–12” give the same number) on the other hand. The main question was, whether these overlapping activations would fall within areas, consistently identified as hubs by network-based analyses. Indeed, the two contrasts showed significant conjunctions in the left inferior parietal lobe (IPL), precuneus (PC), and posterior cingulate. Accordingly, identity processing may well be one domain-general meta-cognitive function that hub-areas provide to domain-specific networks. For the parietal lobe we back up our hypothesis further with existing reports of activation peaks for other tasks that depend on identity processing, e.g., episodic recollection, theory of mind, and visual perspective taking.