Temperament and neural activation during the affective Stroop task: A functional connectivity study

Altered aversive learning represents a potential mechanism through which childhood trauma (CT) might influence risk for psychopathology. This study examines the temporal dynamics of neural activation and patterns of functional connectivity during aversive learning in children with and without CT, and evaluates whether these neural patterns mediate the association of CT with psychopathology in a longitudinal design. 147 children (aged 8-16 years, 77 with CT) completed a fear conditioning procedure during an fMRI scan. Dynamic patterns of neural activation were examined in whole-brain and region-of-interest analyses; functional connectivity was assessed with generalized psychophysiological interaction analyses. We evaluated whether the associations between CT and psychopathology symptoms at baseline and two-year follow-up were mediated by neural activation and connectivity during aversive learning. Children exposed to trauma displayed blunted patterns of neural activation over time during CS+>CS- in right amygdala and during CS->CS+ in right hippocampus and frontal pole. Additionally, during CS+>CS-, CT was associated with elevated functional connectivity of right amygdala with fronto-parietal regions and reduced connectivity with hippocampus, posterior parahippocampal gyrus, and posterior cingulate cortex. The longitudinal association between CT and later externalizing symptoms was mediated by blunted activation in right amygdala and insula. Reduced amygdala-hippocampal connectivity mediated the association of CT with transdiagnostic anxiety symptoms. CT is associated with poor threat-safety discrimination and altered functional coupling between salience and default mode network regions during aversive learning. These altered neural dynamics during learning may be key mechanisms linking CT with internalizing and externalizing psychopathology.

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Neuronal cascades shape whole-brain functional dynamics at rest

10.1101/2020.12.25.424385 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Giovanni Rabuffo ◽

Jan Fousek ◽

Christophe Bernard ◽

Viktor Jirsa

Keyword(s):

Functional Connectivity ◽

Resting State ◽

Blood Oxygen Level Dependent ◽

Brain Network ◽

Neural Activation ◽

Data Set ◽

Whole Brain ◽

Dynamic Component ◽

Leading Role ◽

Co Activation

AbstractAt rest, mammalian brains display a rich complex spatiotemporal behavior, which is reminiscent of healthy brain function and has provided nuanced understandings of several major neurological conditions. Despite the increasingly detailed phenomenological documentation of the brain’s resting state, its principle underlying causes remain unknown. To establish causality, we link structurally defined features of a brain network model to neural activation patterns and their variability. For the mouse, we use a detailed connectome-based model and simulate the resting state dynamics for neural sources and whole brain imaging signals (Blood-Oxygen-Level-Dependent (BOLD), Electroencephalography (EEG)). Under conditions of near-criticality, characteristic neuronal cascades form spontaneously and propagate through the network. The largest neuronal cascades produce short-lived but robust co-fluctuations at pairs of regions across the brain. During these co-activation episodes, long-lasting functional networks emerge giving rise to epochs of stable resting state networks correlated in time. Sets of neural cascades are typical for a resting state network, but different across. We experimentally confirm the existence and stability of functional connectivity epochs comprising BOLD co-activation bursts in mice (N=19). We further demonstrate the leading role of the neuronal cascades in a simultaneous EEG/fMRI data set in humans (N=15), explaining a large part of the variability of functional connectivity dynamics. We conclude that short-lived neuronal cascades are a major robust dynamic component contributing to the organization of the slowly evolving spontaneous fluctuations in brain dynamics at rest.

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Age-related differences in neural activation and functional connectivity during the processing of vocal prosody in adolescence

Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience ◽

10.3758/s13415-019-00742-y ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 19 (6) ◽

pp. 1418-1432 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Michele Morningstar ◽

Whitney I. Mattson ◽

Joseph Venticinque ◽

Stanley Singer ◽

Bhavani Selvaraj ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Functional Connectivity ◽

Neural Activation ◽

Age Related ◽

Vocal Prosody

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Altered Functional Connectivity of the Executive Functions Network During a Stroop Task in Children with Reading Difficulties

Brain Connectivity ◽

10.1089/brain.2018.0595 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 8 (8) ◽

pp. 516-525 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Ophir Levinson ◽

Alexander Hershey ◽

Rola Farah ◽

Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus

Keyword(s):

Functional Connectivity ◽

Executive Functions ◽

Stroop Task ◽

Reading Difficulties

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Measuring Cognitive Flexibility with the Flexible Item Selection Task: From fMRI Adaptation to Individual Connectome Mapping

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience ◽

10.1162/jocn_a_01536 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 32 (6) ◽

pp. 1026-1045 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Dina R. Dajani ◽

Paola Odriozola ◽

Melanie Winters ◽

Willa Voorhies ◽

Selene Marcano ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Functional Connectivity ◽

Cognitive Flexibility ◽

Brain Regions ◽

Individual Variability ◽

Selection Task ◽

Anterior Cingulate ◽

Item Selection ◽

Neural Activation ◽

Subcortical Regions ◽

Inferior Frontal Junction

Cognitive flexibility, the ability to appropriately adjust behavior in a changing environment, has been challenging to operationalize and validate in cognitive neuroscience studies. Here, we investigate neural activation and directed functional connectivity underlying cognitive flexibility using an fMRI-adapted version of the Flexible Item Selection Task (FIST) in adults ( n = 32, ages 19–46 years). The fMRI-adapted FIST was reliable, showed comparable performance to the computer-based version of the task, and produced robust activation in frontoparietal, anterior cingulate, insular, and subcortical regions. During flexibility trials, participants directly engaged the left inferior frontal junction, which influenced activity in other cortical and subcortical regions. The strength of intrinsic functional connectivity between select brain regions was related to individual differences in performance on the FIST, but there was also significant individual variability in functional network topography supporting cognitive flexibility. Taken together, these results suggest that the FIST is a valid measure of cognitive flexibility, which relies on computations within a broad corticosubcortical network driven by inferior frontal junction engagement.

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Abnormal EEG-based functional connectivity under a face-word stroop task in depression

2017 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM) ◽

10.1109/bibm.2017.8217784 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Zhenghao Guo ◽

Hailiang Long ◽

Li Yao ◽

Xia Wu ◽

Hanshu Cai

Keyword(s):

Functional Connectivity ◽

Stroop Task

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Functional connectivity during Stroop task performance

NeuroImage ◽

10.1016/j.neuroimage.2004.08.033 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 24 (1) ◽

pp. 181-191 ◽

Cited By ~ 81

Author(s):

Ben J. Harrison ◽

Marnie Shaw ◽

Murat Yücel ◽

Rosemary Purcell ◽

Warrick J. Brewer ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Functional Connectivity ◽

Task Performance ◽

Stroop Task

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Fronto-striatal Functional Connectivity Supports Reward-Enhanced Memory in Older Adults

10.1101/592501 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Holly J. Bowen ◽

Jaclyn H. Ford ◽

Cheryl L. Grady ◽

Julia Spaniol

Keyword(s):

Older Adults ◽

Functional Connectivity ◽

Healthy Aging ◽

Inferior Frontal Gyrus ◽

Neural Mechanisms ◽

Neural Activation ◽

Younger Adults ◽

Age Related ◽

High Reward ◽

Neural Underpinnings

AbstractBoth younger and older adults prioritize reward-associated stimuli in memory, but there has been little research on possible age differences in the neural mechanisms mediating this effect. In the current study, we examine neural activation and functional connectivity in healthy younger and older adults to test the hypothesis that older adults would engage prefrontal regions to a greater extent in the service of reward-enhanced memory. While undergoing MRI, target stimuli were presented after high or low-reward cues. The cues indicated the reward value for successfully recognizing the stimulus on a memory test 24-hours later. We replicated prior findings that both older and younger and adults had better memory for high compared to low-reward stimuli. Critically, in older, but not younger adults, this enhanced subsequent memory for high-reward items was supported by greater connectivity between the caudate and bilateral inferior frontal gyrus. The findings add to the growing literature on motivation-cognition interactions in healthy aging, and provide novel evidence of an age-related shift in the neural underpinnings of reward-motivated encoding.

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