scholarly journals Transient brain networks underlying interpersonal strategies during synchronized action

Author(s):  
Ole Adrian Heggli ◽  
Ivana Konvalinka ◽  
Joana Cabral ◽  
Elvira Brattico ◽  
Morten L Kringelbach ◽  
...  

Abstract Interpersonal coordination is a core part of human interaction, and its underlying mechanisms have been extensively studied using social paradigms such as joint finger-tapping. Here, individual and dyadic differences have been found to yield a range of dyadic synchronization strategies, such as mutual adaptation, leading–leading, and leading–following behaviour, but the brain mechanisms that underlie these strategies remain poorly understood. To identify individual brain mechanisms underlying emergence of these minimal social interaction strategies, we contrasted EEG-recorded brain activity in two groups of musicians exhibiting the mutual adaptation and leading–leading strategies. We found that the individuals coordinating via mutual adaptation exhibited a more frequent occurrence of phase-locked activity within a transient action–perception-related brain network in the alpha range, as compared to the leading–leading group. Furthermore, we identified parietal and temporal brain regions that changed significantly in the directionality of their within-network information flow. Our results suggest that the stronger weight on extrinsic coupling observed in computational models of mutual adaptation as compared to leading–leading might be facilitated by a higher degree of action–perception network coupling in the brain.

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Finotelli ◽  
Carlo Piccardi ◽  
Edie Miglio ◽  
Paolo Dulio

In this paper, we propose a graphlet-based topological algorithm for the investigation of the brain network at resting state (RS). To this aim, we model the brain as a graph, where (labeled) nodes correspond to specific cerebral areas and links are weighted connections determined by the intensity of the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Then, we select a number of working graphlets, namely, connected and non-isomorphic induced subgraphs. We compute, for each labeled node, its Graphlet Degree Vector (GDV), which allows us to associate a GDV matrix to each one of the 133 subjects of the considered sample, reporting how many times each node of the atlas “touches” the independent orbits defined by the graphlet set. We focus on the 56 independent columns (i.e., non-redundant orbits) of the GDV matrices. By aggregating their count all over the 133 subjects and then by sorting each column independently, we obtain a sorted node table, whose top-level entries highlight the nodes (i.e., brain regions) most frequently touching each of the 56 independent graphlet orbits. Then, by pairwise comparing the columns of the sorted node table in the top-k entries for various values of k, we identify sets of nodes that are consistently involved with high frequency in the 56 independent graphlet orbits all over the 133 subjects. It turns out that these sets consist of labeled nodes directly belonging to the default mode network (DMN) or strongly interacting with it at the RS, indicating that graphlet analysis provides a viable tool for the topological characterization of such brain regions. We finally provide a validation of the graphlet approach by testing its power in catching network differences. To this aim, we encode in a Graphlet Correlation Matrix (GCM) the network information associated with each subject then construct a subject-to-subject Graphlet Correlation Distance (GCD) matrix based on the Euclidean distances between all possible pairs of GCM. The analysis of the clusters induced by the GCD matrix shows a clear separation of the subjects in two groups, whose relationship with the subject characteristics is investigated.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaodan Xing ◽  
Qingfeng Li ◽  
Mengya Yuan ◽  
Hao Wei ◽  
Zhong Xue ◽  
...  

Abstract Functional connectivity (FC) matrices measure the regional interactions in the brain and have been widely used in neurological brain disease classification. A brain network, also named as connectome, could form a graph structure naturally, the nodes of which are brain regions and the edges are interregional connectivity. Thus, in this study, we proposed novel graph convolutional networks (GCNs) to extract efficient disease-related features from FC matrices. Considering the time-dependent nature of brain activity, we computed dynamic FC matrices with sliding windows and implemented a graph convolution–based LSTM (long short–term memory) layer to process dynamic graphs. Moreover, the demographics of patients were also used as additional outputs to guide the classification. In this paper, we proposed to utilize the demographic information as extra outputs and to share parameters among three networks predicting subject status, gender, and age, which serve as assistant tasks. We tested the performance of the proposed architecture in ADNI II dataset to classify Alzheimer’s disease patients from normal controls. The classification accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity reach 90.0%, 91.7%, and 88.6%, respectively, on ADNI II dataset.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giri P. Krishnan ◽  
Oscar C. González ◽  
Maxim Bazhenov

AbstractResting or baseline state low frequency (0.01-0.2 Hz) brain activity has been observed in fMRI, EEG and LFP recordings. These fluctuations were found to be correlated across brain regions, and are thought to reflect neuronal activity fluctuations between functionally connected areas of the brain. However, the origin of these infra-slow fluctuations remains unknown. Here, using a detailed computational model of the brain network, we show that spontaneous infra-slow (< 0.05 Hz) fluctuations could originate due to the ion concentration dynamics. The computational model implemented dynamics for intra and extracellular K+ and Na+ and intracellular Cl- ions, Na+/K+ exchange pump, and KCC2 co-transporter. In the network model representing resting awake-like brain state, we observed slow fluctuations in the extracellular K+ concentration, Na+/K+ pump activation, firing rate of neurons and local field potentials. Holding K+ concentration constant prevented generation of these fluctuations. The amplitude and peak frequency of this activity were modulated by Na+/K+ pump, AMPA/GABA synaptic currents and glial properties. Further, in a large-scale network with long-range connections based on CoCoMac connectivity data, the infra-slow fluctuations became synchronized among remote clusters similar to the resting-state networks observed in vivo. Overall, our study proposes that ion concentration dynamics mediated by neuronal and glial activity may contribute to the generation of very slow spontaneous fluctuations of brain activity that are observed as the resting-state fluctuations in fMRI and EEG recordings.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baohui Jia ◽  
Zhishun Liu ◽  
Baoquan Min ◽  
Zhenchang Wang ◽  
Aihong Zhou ◽  
...  

Accumulating neuroimaging studies in humans have shown that acupuncture can modulate a widely distributed brain network in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients. Acupuncture at different acupoints could exert different modulatory effects on the brain network. However, whether acupuncture at real or sham acupoints can produce different effects on the brain network in MCI or AD patients remains unclear. Using resting-state fMRI, we reported that acupuncture at Taixi (KI3) induced amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (ALFF) change of different brain regions in MCI patients from those shown in the healthy controls. In MCI patients, acupuncture at KI3 increased or decreased ALFF in the different regions from those activated by acupuncture in the healthy controls. Acupuncture at the sham acupoint in MCI patients activated the different brain regions from those in healthy controls. Therefore, we concluded that acupuncture displays more significant effect on neuronal activities of the above brain regions in MCI patients than that in healthy controls. Acupuncture at KI3 exhibits different effects on the neuronal activities of the brain regions from acupuncture at sham acupoint, although the difference is only shown at several regions due to the close distance between the above points.


2016 ◽  
Vol 371 (1705) ◽  
pp. 20160278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikolaus Kriegeskorte ◽  
Jörn Diedrichsen

High-resolution functional imaging is providing increasingly rich measurements of brain activity in animals and humans. A major challenge is to leverage such data to gain insight into the brain's computational mechanisms. The first step is to define candidate brain-computational models (BCMs) that can perform the behavioural task in question. We would then like to infer which of the candidate BCMs best accounts for measured brain-activity data. Here we describe a method that complements each BCM by a measurement model (MM), which simulates the way the brain-activity measurements reflect neuronal activity (e.g. local averaging in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) voxels or sparse sampling in array recordings). The resulting generative model (BCM-MM) produces simulated measurements. To avoid having to fit the MM to predict each individual measurement channel of the brain-activity data, we compare the measured and predicted data at the level of summary statistics. We describe a novel particular implementation of this approach, called probabilistic representational similarity analysis (pRSA) with MMs, which uses representational dissimilarity matrices (RDMs) as the summary statistics. We validate this method by simulations of fMRI measurements (locally averaging voxels) based on a deep convolutional neural network for visual object recognition. Results indicate that the way the measurements sample the activity patterns strongly affects the apparent representational dissimilarities. However, modelling of the measurement process can account for these effects, and different BCMs remain distinguishable even under substantial noise. The pRSA method enables us to perform Bayesian inference on the set of BCMs and to recognize the data-generating model in each case. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Interpreting BOLD: a dialogue between cognitive and cellular neuroscience’.


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoed N. Kenett ◽  
Roger E. Beaty ◽  
John D. Medaglia

AbstractRumination and impaired inhibition are considered core characteristics of depression. However, the neurocognitive mechanisms that contribute to these atypical cognitive processes remain unclear. To address this question, we apply a computational network control theory approach to structural brain imaging data acquired via diffusion tensor imaging in a large sample of participants, to examine how network control theory relates to individual differences in subclinical depression. Recent application of this theory at the neural level is built on a model of brain dynamics, which mathematically models patterns of inter-region activity propagated along the structure of an underlying network. The strength of this approach is its ability to characterize the potential role of each brain region in regulating whole-brain network function based on its anatomical fingerprint and a simplified model of node dynamics. We find that subclinical depression is negatively related to higher integration abilities in the right anterior insula, replicating and extending previous studies implicating atypical switching between the default mode and Executive Control Networks in depression. We also find that subclinical depression is related to the ability to “drive” the brain system into easy to reach neural states in several brain regions, including the bilateral lingual gyrus and lateral occipital gyrus. These findings highlight brain regions less known in their role in depression, and clarify their roles in driving the brain into different neural states related to depression symptoms.


2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleni G. Christodoulou ◽  
Vangelis Sakkalis ◽  
Vassilis Tsiaras ◽  
Ioannis G. Tollis

This paper presents BrainNetVis, a tool which serves brain network modelling and visualization, by providing both quantitative and qualitative network measures of brain interconnectivity. It emphasizes the needs that led to the creation of this tool by presenting similar works in the field and by describing how our tool contributes to the existing scenery. It also describes the methods used for the calculation of the graph metrics (global network metrics and vertex metrics), which carry the brain network information. To make the methods clear and understandable, we use an exemplar dataset throughout the paper, on which the calculations and the visualizations are performed. This dataset consists of an alcoholic and a control group of subjects.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mo Shahdloo ◽  
Emin Çelik ◽  
Burcu A Urgen ◽  
Jack L. Gallant ◽  
Tolga Çukur

Object and action perception in cluttered dynamic natural scenes relies on efficient allocation of limited brain resources to prioritize the attended targets over distractors. It has been suggested that during visual search for objects, distributed semantic representation of hundreds of object categories is warped to expand the representation of targets. Yet, little is known about whether and where in the brain visual search for action categories modulates semantic representations. To address this fundamental question, we studied human brain activity recorded via functional magnetic resonance imaging while subjects viewed natural movies and searched for either communication or locomotion actions. We find that attention directed to action categories elicits tuning shifts that warp semantic representations broadly across neocortex, and that these shifts interact with intrinsic selectivity of cortical voxels for target actions. These results suggest that attention serves to facilitate task performance during social interactions by dynamically shifting semantic selectivity towards target actions, and that tuning shifts are a general feature of conceptual representations in the brain.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Pinho ◽  
Vincent T. Cunliffe ◽  
Giovanni Petri ◽  
Rui Oliveira

Group living animals can use social and asocial cues to predict the presence of a reward or a punishment in the environment through associative learning. The degree to which social and asocial learning share the same mechanisms is still a matter of debate, and, so far, studies investigating the neuronal basis of these two types of learning are scarce and have been restricted to primates, including humans, and rodents. Here we have used a Pavlovian fear conditioning paradigm in which a social (fish image) or an asocial (circle image) conditioned stimulus (CS) have been paired with an unconditioned stimulus (US=food), and we have used the expression of the immediate early gene c-fos to map the neural circuits associated with social and asocial learning. Our results show that the learning performance is similar with social (fish image) and asocial (circle image) CSs. However, the brain regions involved in each learning type are distinct. Social learning is associated with an increased expression of c-fos in olfactory bulbs, ventral zone of ventral telencephalic area, ventral habenula and ventromedial thalamus, whereas asocial learning is associated with a decreased expression of c-fos in dorsal habenula and anterior tubercular nucleus. Using egonetworks, we further show that each learning type has an associated pattern of functional connectivity across brain regions. Moreover, a community analysis of the network data reveals four segregated functional submodules, which seem to be associated with different cognitive functions involved in the learning tasks: a generalized attention module, a visual response module, a social stimulus integration module and a learning module. Together, these results suggest that, although there are localized differences in brain activity between social and asocial learning, the two learning types share a common learning module and social learning also recruits a specific social stimulus integration module. Therefore, our results support the occurrence of a common general-purpose learning module, that is differentially modulated by localized activation in social and asocial learning.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takashi Nakano ◽  
Masahiro Takamura ◽  
Haruki Nishimura ◽  
Maro Machizawa ◽  
Naho Ichikawa ◽  
...  

AbstractNeurofeedback (NF) aptitude, which refers to an individual’s ability to change its brain activity through NF training, has been reported to vary significantly from person to person. The prediction of individual NF aptitudes is critical in clinical NF applications. In the present study, we extracted the resting-state functional brain connectivity (FC) markers of NF aptitude independent of NF-targeting brain regions. We combined the data in fMRI-NF studies targeting four different brain regions at two independent sites (obtained from 59 healthy adults and six patients with major depressive disorder) to collect the resting-state fMRI data associated with aptitude scores in subsequent fMRI-NF training. We then trained the regression models to predict the individual NF aptitude scores from the resting-state fMRI data using a discovery dataset from one site and identified six resting-state FCs that predicted NF aptitude. Next we validated the prediction model using independent test data from another site. The result showed that the posterior cingulate cortex was the functional hub among the brain regions and formed predictive resting-state FCs, suggesting NF aptitude may be involved in the attentional mode-orientation modulation system’s characteristics in task-free resting-state brain activity.


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