scholarly journals How Does Reward Expectation Influence Cognition in the Human Brain?

2008 ◽  
Vol 20 (11) ◽  
pp. 1980-1992 ◽  
Author(s):  
James B. Rowe ◽  
Doris Eckstein ◽  
Todd Braver ◽  
Adrian M. Owen

The prospect of reward changes how we think and behave. We investigated how this occurs in the brain using a novel continuous performance task in which fluctuating reward expectations biased cognitive processes between competing spatial and verbal tasks. Critically, effects of reward expectancy could be distinguished from induced changes in task-related networks. Behavioral data confirm specific bias toward a reward-relevant modality. Increased reward expectation improves reaction time and accuracy in the relevant dimension while reducing sensitivity to modulations of stimuli characteristics in the irrelevant dimension. Analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging data shows that the proximity to reward over successive trials is associated with increased activity of the medial frontal cortex regardless of the modality. However, there are modality-specific changes in brain activity in the lateral frontal, parietal, and temporal cortex. Analysis of effective connectivity suggests that reward expectancy enhances coupling in both early visual pathways and within the prefrontal cortex. These distributed changes in task-related cortical networks arise from subjects' representations of future events and likelihood of reward.

2022 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jing Ren ◽  
Qun Yao ◽  
Minjie Tian ◽  
Feng Li ◽  
Yueqiu Chen ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Migraine is a common and disabling primary headache, which is associated with a wide range of psychiatric comorbidities. However, the mechanisms of emotion processing in migraine are not fully understood yet. The present study aimed to investigate the neural network during neutral, positive, and negative emotional stimuli in the migraine patients. Methods A total of 24 migraine patients and 24 age- and sex-matching healthy controls were enrolled in this study. Neuromagnetic brain activity was recorded using a whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG) system upon exposure to human facial expression stimuli. MEG data were analyzed in multi-frequency ranges from 1 to 100 Hz. Results The migraine patients exhibited a significant enhancement in the effective connectivity from the prefrontal lobe to the temporal cortex during the negative emotional stimuli in the gamma frequency (30–90 Hz). Graph theory analysis revealed that the migraine patients had an increased degree and clustering coefficient of connectivity in the delta frequency range (1–4 Hz) upon exposure to positive emotional stimuli and an increased degree of connectivity in the delta frequency range (1–4 Hz) upon exposure to negative emotional stimuli. Clinical correlation analysis showed that the history, attack frequency, duration, and neuropsychological scales of the migraine patients had a negative correlation with the network parameters in certain frequency ranges. Conclusions The results suggested that the individuals with migraine showed deviant effective connectivity in viewing the human facial expressions in multi-frequencies. The prefrontal-temporal pathway might be related to the altered negative emotional modulation in migraine. These findings suggested that migraine might be characterized by more universal altered cerebral processing of negative stimuli. Since the significant result in this study was frequency-specific, more independent replicative studies are needed to confirm these results, and to elucidate the neurocircuitry underlying the association between migraine and emotional conditions.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jing Ren ◽  
Qun Yao ◽  
Minjie Tian ◽  
Feng Li ◽  
Yueqiu Chen ◽  
...  

Abstract Background: Migraine is a common and disabling primary headache associated with a wide range of psychiatric comorbidities. However, the mechanisms of emotion processing in migraine are not fully understood yet. The present study was designed to investigate the neural network during neutral, positive,and negative emotional stimuli in migraine suffers.Methods: We enrolled 24 migraine suffers and 24 age- and sex-matched controls in this study. Neuromagnetic brain activity was recorded by using a whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG) system towards human faces expression pictures. MEG data were analyzed in the multi-frequency band of 1–100 Hz.Results: Migraine patients exhibited significantly enhanced effective connectivity from the prefrontal lobe to the temporal cortex during negative emotional stimuli in the gamma band(30-90Hz). Graph theory analysis revealed that patients had (1) an increased degree and clustering coefficient of connectivity in the delta band(1-4Hz) during positive emotional stimuli; (2) an increased degree of connectivity in the delta band(1-4Hz) during negative emotional stimuli.Conclusion: The results suggested individuals with migraine showed deviant effective connectivity when viewing human facial expressions in multi-frequency. The prefrontal-temporal pathway might be related to the altered negative emotion modulation in migraine. These findings may contribute to understanding the mechanism of the comorbidity of depression and anxiety in migraine and provide references for the comprehensive therapeutic plan.


2000 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 622-634 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matti Laine ◽  
Riitta Salmelin ◽  
Päivi Helenius ◽  
Reijo Marttila

Magnetoencephalographic (MEG) changes in cortical activity were studied in a chronic Finnish-speaking deep dyslexic patient during single-word and sentence reading. It has been hypothesized that in deep dyslexia, written word recognition and its lexical-semantic analysis are subserved by the intact right hemisphere. However, in our patient, as well as in most nonimpaired readers, lexical-semantic processing as measured by sentence-final semantic-incongruency detection was related to the left superior-temporal cortex activation. Activations around this same cortical area could be identified in single-word reading as well. Another factor relevant to deep dyslexic reading, the morphological complexity of the presented words, was also studied. The effect of morphology was observed only during the preparation for oral output. By performing repeated recordings 1 year apart, we were able to document significant variability in both the spontaneous activity and the evoked responses in the lesioned left hemisphere even though at the behavioural level, the patient's performance was stable. The observed variability emphasizes the importance of estimating consistency of brain activity both within and between measurements in brain-damaged individuals.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aymen Sadaka ◽  
Ana Ozuna ◽  
Richard Ortiz ◽  
Praveen Kulkarni ◽  
Clare Johnson ◽  
...  

Abstract Background: The phytocannabinoid cannabidiol (CBD) is a potential treatment for post-traumatic stress disorders. How does CBD interact with the brain to alter behavior? We hypothesized that CBD would produce a dose-dependent reduction in brain activity and functional coupling in neural circuitry associated with fear and defense. Methods: During the scanning session awake mice were given vehicle or CBD (3, 10, or 30 mg/kg I.P.) and imaged for 10 min post treatment. Mice were also treated with the 10 mg/kg dose of CBD and imaged one hr later for resting state BOLD functional connectivity (rsFC). Imaging data were registered to a 3D MRI mouse atlas providing site-specific information on 138 different brain areas. Blood samples were collected for CBD measurements.Results: CBD produced a dose-dependent polarization of activation along the rostral-caudal axis of the brain. The olfactory bulb and prefrontal cortex showed an increase in positive BOLD whereas the brainstem and cerebellum showed a decrease in BOLD signal. This negative BOLD affected many areas connected to the ascending reticular activating system (ARAS). The ARAS was decoupled to much of the brain but was hyperconnected to the olfactory system and prefrontal cortex. The pattern of ARAS connectivity closely overlapped with brain areas showing high levels N-acyl-phosphatidylethanolamines-specific phospholipase D (NAPE-PLD) messenger RNA.Conclusion: The CBD-induced decrease in ARAS activity is consistent with an emerging literature suggesting that CBD reduces autonomic arousal under conditions of emotional and physical stress. The putative target and mechanism of action is NAPE-PLD the enzyme responsible for the biosynthesis of lipid signaling molecules like anandamide.


2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (10) ◽  
pp. 4398-4414 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baptiste Gauthier ◽  
Karin Pestke ◽  
Virginie van Wassenhove

Abstract When moving, the spatiotemporal unfolding of events is bound to our physical trajectory, and time and space become entangled in episodic memory. When imagining past or future events, or being in different geographical locations, the temporal and spatial dimensions of mental events can be independently accessed and manipulated. Using time-resolved neuroimaging, we characterized brain activity while participants ordered historical events from different mental perspectives in time (e.g., when imagining being 9 years in the future) or in space (e.g., when imagining being in Cayenne). We describe 2 neural signatures of temporal ordinality: an early brain response distinguishing whether participants were mentally in the past, the present or the future (self-projection in time), and a graded activity at event retrieval, indexing the mental distance between the representation of the self in time and the event. Neural signatures of ordinality and symbolic distances in time were distinct from those observed in the homologous spatial task: activity indicating spatial order and distances overlapped in latency in distinct brain regions. We interpret our findings as evidence that the conscious representation of time and space share algorithms (egocentric mapping, distance, and ordinality computations) but different implementations with a distinctive status for the psychological “time arrow.”


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan E Peelle ◽  
Brent Spehar ◽  
Michael S Jones ◽  
Sarah McConkey ◽  
Joel Myerson ◽  
...  

In everyday conversation, we usually process the talker's face as well as the sound of their voice. Access to visual speech information is particularly useful when the auditory signal is degraded. Here we used fMRI to monitor brain activity while adults (n = 60) were presented with visual-only, auditory-only, and audiovisual words. As expected, audiovisual speech perception recruited both auditory and visual cortex, with a trend towards increased recruitment of premotor cortex in more difficult conditions (for example, in substantial background noise). We then investigated neural connectivity using psychophysiological interaction (PPI) analysis with seed regions in both primary auditory cortex and primary visual cortex. Connectivity between auditory and visual cortices was stronger in audiovisual conditions than in unimodal conditions, including a wide network of regions in posterior temporal cortex and prefrontal cortex. Taken together, our results suggest a prominent role for cross-region synchronization in understanding both visual-only and audiovisual speech.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raúl Hernández-Pérez ◽  
Luis Concha ◽  
Laura V. Cuaya

AbstractDogs can interpret emotional human faces (especially the ones expressing happiness), yet the cerebral correlates of this process are unknown. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) we studied eight awake and unrestrained dogs. In Experiment 1 dogs observed happy and neutral human faces, and found increased brain activity when viewing happy human faces in temporal cortex and caudate. In Experiment 2 the dogs were presented with human faces expressing happiness, anger, fear, or sadness. Using the resulting cluster from Experiment 1 we trained a linear support vector machine classifier to discriminate between pairs of emotions and found that it could only discriminate between happiness and the other emotions. Finally, evaluation of the whole-brain fMRI time courses through a similar classifier allowed us to predict the emotion being observed by the dogs. Our results show that human emotions are specifically represented in dogs’ brains, highlighting their importance for inter-species communication.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yilei Chen ◽  
Yingjie Kang ◽  
Shilei Luo ◽  
Shanshan Liu ◽  
Bo Wang ◽  
...  

Abstract Background: The underlying neurological mechanism of acupuncture treatment in migraine without aura (MwoA) remains unclear. Therefore, we explored the dynamic alterations of intrinsic brain activity and effective connectivity in patients with MwoA after acupuncture treatment.Methods:The fMRI scans were separately obtained at baseline, after the first and after the 12th acupuncture sessions in 40 patients with MwoA. The acupuncture treatments were finished within 6 weeks as twice a week. 36 matched healthy controls (HCs) were recruited and performed once fMRI scan. The dynamic amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (dALFF) and dynamic granger causality analysis(GCA) were used to analyze the difference of different time points in patients with MwoA. The correlation analyses were performed in dALFF variability, dynamic effective connectivity (DEC) variability with clinical variables in patients with MwoA.Results:Compared with HCs, Patients with MwoA at baseline showed decreased dALFF variability in regions within rostral ventromedial medulla (RVM), the superior lobe of left cerebellum (Cerebelum_Crus1_L), the right inferior frontal gyrus, triangular part (IFGtriang.R), the right median cingulate and paracingulate gyri (DCG.R), the right precuneus (PCUN.R), and the left inferior parietal, supramarginal and angular gyri (IPL.L), increased dALFF variability only in the left inferior occipital gyrus (IOG.L). After acupuncture treatment, the decreased dALFF variability of the RVM, Cerebelum_Crus1_L , and PCUN.R progressively recovered, the RVM revealed gradually increased DEC variability to the right middle frontal gyrus (MFG.R), the left insula (INS.L), the right precentral gyrus (PreCG.R), and the right supramarginal gyrus (SMG.R). And enhanced DEC variability from the right fusiform gyrus (FFG.R) to RVM. Furthermore, the increased DEC variability were found from Cerebelum_Crus1_L to the left middle occipital gyrus (MOG.L) and the left precentral gyrus (PreCG.L), from PCUN.R to the right thalamus (THA.R). These dALFF variabilities were significantly positive correlated with frequency of migraine attack and negative correlated with disease duration at baseline, dynamic GCA coefficients were significantly positive correlated with Migraine-Specific Quality of Life Questionnaire (MSQ) score, negative correlated with frequency of migraine attack and visual analog scale (VAS) score postacupuncture treatment.Conclusions:Our results provide insight into dynamic alterations from the perspective of dynamic local brain activity and effective connectivity for the understanding mechanisms of cumulative therapeutic effect of acupuncture in patients with MwoA.Trial registration: ChiCTR, ChiCTR1900023105. Registered 11 May 2019, http://www.chictr.org.cn/showproj.aspx?proj=36959.


2016 ◽  
Vol 627 ◽  
pp. 24-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Koji Jimura ◽  
Satoshi Hirose ◽  
Hiroyuki Wada ◽  
Yasunori Yoshizawa ◽  
Yoshio Imai ◽  
...  

2000 ◽  
Vol 12 (supplement 2) ◽  
pp. 106-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine M. Arrington ◽  
Thomas H. Carr ◽  
Andrew R. Mayer ◽  
Stephen M. Rao

Objects play an important role in guiding spatial attention through a cluttered visual environment. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (ER-fMRI) to measure brain activity during cued discrimination tasks requiring subjects to orient attention either to a region bounded by an object (object-based spatial attention) or to an unbounded region of space (location-based spatial attention) in anticipation of an upcoming target. Comparison between the two tasks revealed greater activation when attention selected a region bounded by an object. This activation was strongly lateralized to the left hemisphere and formed a widely distributed network including (a) attentional structures in parietal and temporal cortex and thalamus, (b) ventral-stream object processing structures in occipital, inferior-temporal, and parahippocampal cortex, and (c) control structures in medial-and dorsolateral-prefrontal cortex. These results suggest that object-based spatial selection is achieved by imposing additional constraints over and above those processes already operating to achieve selection of an unbounded region. In addition, ER-fMRI methodology allowed a comparison of validly versus invalidly cued trials, thereby delineating brain structures involved in the reorientation of attention after its initial deployment proved incorrect. All areas of activation that differentiated between these two trial types resulted from greater activity during the invalid trials. This outcome suggests that all brain areas involved in attentional orienting and task performance in response to valid cues are also involved on invalid trials. During invalid trials, additional brain regions are recruited when a perceiver recovers from invalid cueing and reorients attention to a target appearing at an uncued location. Activated brain areas specific to attentional reorientation were strongly right-lateralized and included posterior temporal and inferior parietal regions previously implicated in visual attention processes, as well as prefrontal regions that likely subserve control processes, particularly related to inhibition of inappropriate responding.


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