Cognitive Coping Style Modulates Neural Responses to Emotional Faces in Healthy Humans: A 3-T fMRI Study

Transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) has emerged as a promising technique to non-invasively modulate the endogenous oscillations in the human brain. Despite its clinical potential to be applied in routine rehabilitation therapies, the underlying modulation mechanism has not been thoroughly understood, especially for patients with neurological disorders, including stroke. In this study, we aimed to investigate the frequency-specific stimulation effect of tACS in chronic stroke. Thirteen chronic stroke patients underwent tACS intervention, while resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were collected under various frequencies (sham, 10 Hz and 20 Hz). The graph theoretical analysis indicated that 20 Hz tACS might facilitate local segregation in motor-related regions and global integration at the whole-brain level. However, 10 Hz was only observed to increase the segregation from whole-brain level. Additionally, it is also observed that, for the network in motor-related regions, the nodal clustering characteristic was decreased after 10 Hz tACS, but increased after 20 Hz tACS. Taken together, our results suggested that tACS in various frequencies might induce heterogeneous modulation effects in lesioned brains. Specifically, 20 Hz tACS might induce more modulation effects, especially in motor-related regions, and they have the potential to be applied in rehabilitation therapies to facilitate neuromodulation. Our findings might shed light on the mechanism of neural responses to tACS and facilitate effectively designing stimulation protocols with tACS in stroke in the future.

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Ghrelin Enhances Food Odor Conditioning in Healthy Humans: An fMRI Study

Cell Reports ◽

10.1016/j.celrep.2018.11.026 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 25 (10) ◽

pp. 2643-2652.e4 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Jung Eun Han ◽

Johannes Frasnelli ◽

Yashar Zeighami ◽

Kevin Larcher ◽

Julie Boyle ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Food Odor ◽

Healthy Humans ◽

Fmri Study ◽

Odor Conditioning

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Rapid neural representations of personally relevant faces

10.1101/585133 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Mareike Bayer ◽

Oksana Berhe ◽

Isabel Dziobek ◽

Tom Johnstone

Keyword(s):

Time Course ◽

Primary Source ◽

Relevant Information ◽

Neural Circuitry ◽

Romantic Partners ◽

Personal Relevance ◽

Neural Responses ◽

Emotional Faces ◽

Neural Representations ◽

Processing Network

AbstractThe faces of those most personally relevant to us are our primary source of social information, making their timely perception a priority. Recent research indicates that gender, age and identity of faces can be decoded from EEG/MEG data within 100ms. Yet the time course and neural circuitry involved in representing the personal relevance of faces remain unknown. We applied simultaneous EEG-fMRI to examine neural responses to emotional faces of female participants’ romantic partners, friends, and a stranger. Combining EEG and fMRI in cross-modal representational similarity analyses, we provide evidence that representations of personal relevance start prior to structural encoding at 100ms in visual cortex, but also in prefrontal and midline regions involved in value representation, and monitoring and recall of self-relevant information. Representations related to romantic love emerged after 300ms. Our results add to an emerging body of research that suggests that models of face perception need to be updated to account for rapid detection of personal relevance in cortical circuitry beyond the core face processing network.

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