Figure 2. The progression from a faculty psychology/modular approach towards a constructionist/distributed structure approach to brain-function inferences.
In (a), individual brain regions specifically compute a domain-specific psychological faculty that could be isolated with a domain-specific behavioral task. In (b), domain-specific brain networks interact to produce responses within domain-specific tasks. (c) Functional motifs within domain-general intrinsic brain networks interact to produce a wide variety of tasks; dotted lines indicate that every network is not necessary engaged to support every task response. Constellations of subprocesses likely underlie each higher order functional description (e.g. “motor movements” can be broken down into layers of motor selection, involving lateral inhibition, etc.). We utilize the higher order process descriptions in this figure to highlight the point that even at a higher order of description, the processes comprising “somatovisceral regulation” are domain-general processes that are not specific to emotion, the processes comprising “mentalizing” are not specific to social cognition, and so on.