The Autonomic Dynamics and Performance Tuning (ADAPT) Framework

This manuscript introduces the Autonomic Dynamics and Performance Tuning (ADAPT) framework. ADAPT takes the perspective that the central autonomic nervous system (ANS), traditionally recognized for its role in physiological regulation and survival reflexes, serves as the ancestral core of modern human cognition and its underlying neurocognitive circuitry. Working forward from that premise, the framework describes how the ANS modulates the expression of underlying neurocognitive ‘atoms’ to shape flexible, adaptive behavior in the immediate term, and shapes plastic adaptation over time as emergent properties of its role in physiological regulation. In doing so, ADAPT ties together canonical behavioral and neuroimaging findings, reconciles disparate interventional results, and suggests broad implications for the development, maintenance, and decline of neurocognitive function and dysfunction across the lifespan. Rather than a repudiation of existing paradigms and frameworks, ADAPT provides a complementary perspective that can account for some of the imprecision of current approaches, as well as adding explanatory leverage and suggesting novel lines of inquiry within existing approaches and paradigms. Indeed, the manuscript concludes with suggestions for methodological and conceptual consideration to improve assessment of ANS integrity, neurocognitive performance and dysfunction, behavioral variability, and guidance for interventional approaches.