In insight problem-solving, cognitive conflict and restructuring recruit partially-overlapping-but-distinct brain networks — with the angular and middle temporal gyri active across both phases

Danek & Flanagin's magic-trick fMRI paradigm decomposed insight into two sub-processes and asked whether they are neurally the same. Their answer: "partially overlapping but distinct networks of brain activity were recruited for cognitive conflict and restructuring." Conflict was carried by "posterior, predominantly visual brain activity… related to prediction error, attention… and the default brain state"; restructuring by "a highly distributed pattern of brain activity in regions of the default mode, executive control networks, and salience networks."

The named exception to that dissociation: "the angular gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, frontal eye fields and DLPFC were all active in both cognitive conflict and restructuring, suggesting a more overarching role of these regions in the whole insight process." So a handful of regions are phase-general while the bulk of each phase's network is phase-specific.

Why this is on the vault's shelf, distinct from claim-cognitive-conflict-prerequisite-for-restructuring (which is about conflict being necessary): this is about separability. Conflict and restructuring being largely distinct networks is neural evidence that detecting a misfit and reorganizing around it are two operations, not one — directly relevant to whether the vault should treat gap-detection (the conflict analogue, moc-knowledge-gap-detection) and consolidation (the restructuring analogue, question-consolidation-pass-vs-revisit-protocol) as separate mechanisms rather than one pass. Honest scope: one paper's within-study contrast (incongruent-vs-congruent cues; correct-vs-incorrect solutions), not an independently replicated result. Prediction-error appears here too as the conflict driver — the same trigger as claim-schema-change-four-mode-taxonomy and claim-p3-indexes-prediction-error-schema-updating. Entity candidates flagged not decided: Danek, Flanagin.