Macroscopic information-based taste representations in insular cortex are shaped by stimulus concentration.

Taste processing is an essential ability in all animals signaling potential harm or benefit of ingestive behavior. However, current evidence for cortical taste representations remains contradictory. To address this issue, high-resolution functional MRI (fMRI) and multivariate pattern analysis were used to characterize taste-related informational content in human insular cortex, which contains primary gustatory cortex. Human participants judged pleasantness and intensity of low- and high-concentration tastes (salty, sweet, sour, and bitter) in two fMRI experiments on two different days to test for task- and concentration-invariant taste representations. We observed patterns of fMRI activity within insular cortex narrowly tuned to specific tastants consistently across tasks in all participants. Fewer patterns responded to more than one taste category. Importantly, changes in taste concentration altered the spatial layout of putative taste-specific patterns with distinct, almost nonoverlapping patterns for each taste category at different concentration levels. Together, our results point at macroscopic representations in human insular cortex as a complex function of taste category and concentration rather than representations based solely on taste identity.

Increased Hippocampal Excitability and Altered Learning Dynamics Mediate Cognitive Mapping Deficits in Human Aging.

Learning the spatial layout of a novel environment is associated with dynamic activity changes in the hippocampus and in medial parietal areas. With advancing age, the ability to learn spatial environments deteriorates substantially but the underlying neural mechanisms are not well understood. Here, we report findings from a behavioral and a fMRI experiment where healthy human older and younger adults of either sex performed a spatial learning task in a photorealistic virtual environment (VE). We modeled individual learning states using a Bayesian state-space model and found that activity in retrosplenial cortex (RSC)/parieto-occipital sulcus (POS) and anterior hippocampus did not change systematically as a function learning in older compared with younger adults across repeated episodes in the environment. Moreover, effective connectivity analyses revealed that the age-related learning deficits were linked to an increase in hippocampal excitability. Together, these results provide novel insights into how human aging affects computations in the brain's navigation system, highlighting the critical role of the hippocampus.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Key structures of the brain's navigation circuit are particularly vulnerable to the deleterious consequences of aging, and declines in spatial navigation are among the earliest indicators for a progression from healthy aging to neurodegenerative diseases. Our study is among the first to provide a mechanistic account about how physiological changes in the aging brain affect the formation of spatial knowledge. We show that neural activity in the aging hippocampus and medial parietal areas is decoupled from individual learning states across repeated episodes in a novel spatial environment. Importantly, we find that increased excitability of the anterior hippocampus might constitute a potential neural mechanism for cognitive mapping deficits in old age.

Reinstatement of Cortical Outcome Representations during Higher-Order Learning.

Naturalistic learning scenarios are characterized by infrequent experience of external feedback to guide behavior. Higher-order learning mechanisms like second-order conditioning (SOC) may allow stimuli that were never experienced together with reinforcement to acquire motivational value. Despite its explanatory potential for real-world learning, surprisingly little is known about the neural mechanism underlying such associative transfer of value in SOC. Here, we used multivariate cross-session, cross-modality searchlight classification on functional magnetic resonance imaging data obtained from humans during SOC. We show that visual first-order conditioned stimuli (CS) reinstate cortical patterns representing previously paired gustatory outcomes in the lateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). During SOC, this OFC region showed increased functional covariation with amygdala, where neural pattern similarity between second-order CS and outcomes increased from early to late stages of SOC. Our data suggest a mechanism by which motivational value is conferred to stimuli that were never paired with reinforcement.

7T MR neurography-ultrasound fusion for peripheral nerve imaging.

BACKGROUND: We present one patient with an initial diagnosis of Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) and one with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (CMT) type 1A. METHODS: Both patients underwent ankle tibial nerve fusion-imaging of high-resolution ultrasound (HRUS) with 7T MR neurography (MRN). RESULTS: In GBS, the nerve was enlarged, T2-hyperintense, and showed increased vascularization 21 months after symptom onset. In CMT1A, the enlarged nerve was T2-isointense with normal endoneurial blood flow. CONCLUSIONS: We demonstrate the utility of 7T-MRN-HRUS-fusion-imaging. In GBS, there was evidence of ongoing inflammation resulting in a changed diagnosis to acute-onset chronic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy and maintenance of immunotherapy. By MRN-HRUS-fusion, patients with presumed peripheral axonal degeneration could be shown to display imaging markers associated with peripheral nervous system inflammation. Thus, more accurate identification of a treatable inflammatory component may become possible.

The anterior insula channels prefrontal expectancy signals during affective processing.

Expectancy shapes our perception of impending events. Although such an interplay between cognitive and affective processes is often impaired in mental disorders, it is not well understood how top-down expectancy signals modulate future affect. We therefore track the information flow in the brain during cognitive and affective processing segregated in time using task-specific cross-correlations. Participants in two independent fMRI studies (N1 = 37 & N2 = 55) were instructed to imagine a situation with affective content as indicated by a cue, which was then followed by an emotional picture congruent with expectancy. To correct for intrinsic covariance of brain function, we calculate resting-state cross-correlations analogous to the task. First, using factorial modeling of delta cross-correlations (task-rest) of the first study, we find that the magnitude of expectancy signals in the anterior insula cortex (AIC) modulates the BOLD response to emotional pictures in the anterior cingulate and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex in opposite directions. Second, using hierarchical linear modeling of lagged connectivity, we demonstrate that expectancy signals in the AIC indeed foreshadow this opposing pattern in the prefrontal cortex. Third, we replicate the results in the second study using a higher temporal resolution, showing that our task-specific cross-correlation approach robustly uncovers the dynamics of information flow. We conclude that the AIC arbitrates the recruitment of distinct prefrontal networks during cued picture processing according to triggered expectations. Taken together, our study provides new insights into neuronal pathways channeling cognition and affect within well-defined brain networks. Better understanding of such dynamics could lead to new applications tracking aberrant information processing in mental disorders.

The role of auditory cortex in the spatial ventriloquism aftereffect.

Cross-modal recalibration allows the brain to maintain coherent sensory representations of the world. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the present study aimed at identifying the neural mechanisms underlying recalibration in an audiovisual ventriloquism aftereffect paradigm. Participants performed a unimodal sound localization task, before and after they were exposed to adaptation blocks, in which sounds were paired with spatially disparate visual stimuli offset by 14° to the right. Behavioral results showed a significant rightward shift in sound localization following adaptation, indicating a ventriloquism aftereffect. Regarding fMRI results, left and right planum temporale (lPT/rPT) were found to respond more to contralateral sounds than to central sounds at pretest. Contrasting posttest with pretest blocks revealed significantly enhanced fMRI-signals in space-sensitive lPT after adaptation, matching the behavioral rightward shift in sound localization. Moreover, a region-of-interest analysis in lPT/rPT revealed that the lPT activity correlated positively with the localization shift for right-side sounds, whereas rPT activity correlated negatively with the localization shift for left-side and central sounds. Finally, using functional connectivity analysis, we observed enhanced coupling of the lPT with left and right inferior parietal areas as well as left motor regions following adaptation and a decoupling of lPT/rPT with contralateral auditory cortex, which scaled with participants' degree of adaptation. Together, the fMRI results suggest that cross-modal spatial recalibration is accomplished by an adjustment of unisensory representations in low-level auditory cortex. Such persistent adjustments of low-level sensory representations seem to be mediated by the interplay with higher-level spatial representations in parietal cortex.

How task demands shape brain responses to visual food cues.

Several previous imaging studies have aimed at identifying the neural basis of visual food cue processing in humans. However, there is little consistency of the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) results across studies. Here, we tested the hypothesis that this variability across studies might - at least in part - be caused by the different tasks employed. In particular, we assessed directly the influence of task set on brain responses to food stimuli with fMRI using two tasks (colour vs. edibility judgement, between-subjects design). When participants judged colour, the left insula, the left inferior parietal lobule, occipital areas, the left orbitofrontal cortex and other frontal areas expressed enhanced fMRI responses to food relative to non-food pictures. However, when judging edibility, enhanced fMRI responses to food pictures were observed in the superior and middle frontal gyrus and in medial frontal areas including the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. This pattern of results indicates that task sets can significantly alter the neural underpinnings of food cue processing. We propose that judging low-level visual stimulus characteristics - such as colour - triggers stimulus-related representations in the visual and even in gustatory cortex (insula), whereas discriminating abstract stimulus categories activates higher order representations in both the anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortex. Hum Brain Mapp 38:2897-2912, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Increased functional connectivity between superior colliculus and brain regions implicated in bodily self-consciousness during the rubber hand illusion.

Bodily self-consciousness refers to bodily processes operating at personal, peripersonal, and extrapersonal spatial dimensions. Although the neural underpinnings of representations of personal and peripersonal space associated with bodily self-consciousness were thoroughly investigated, relatively few is known about the neural underpinnings of representations of extrapersonal space relevant for bodily self-consciousness. In the search to unravel brain structures generating a representation of the extrapersonal space relevant for bodily self-consciousness, we developed a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study to investigate the implication of the superior colliculus (SC) in bodily illusions, and more specifically in the rubber hand illusion (RHi), which constitutes an established paradigm to study the neural underpinnings of bodily self-consciousness. We observed activation of the colliculus ipsilateral to the manipulated hand associated with eliciting of RHi. A generalized form of context-dependent psychophysiological interaction analysis unravelled increased illusion-dependent functional connectivity between the SC and some of the main brain areas previously involved in bodily self-consciousness: right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ), bilateral ventral premotor cortex (vPM), and bilateral postcentral gyrus. We hypothesize that the collicular map of the extrapersonal space interacts with maps of the peripersonal and personal space generated at rTPJ, vPM and the postcentral gyrus, producing a unified representation of space that is relevant for bodily self-consciousness. We suggest that processes of multisensory integration of bodily-related sensory inputs located in this unified representation of space constitute one main factor underpinning emergence of bodily self-consciousness.

Audio-visual synchrony modulates the ventriloquist illusion and its neural/spatial representation in the auditory cortex.

An essential task of our perceptual systems is to bind together the distinctive features of single objects and events into unitary percepts, even when those features are registered in different sensory modalities. In cases where auditory and visual inputs are spatially incongruent, they may still be perceived as belonging to a single event at the location of the visual stimulus - a phenomenon known as the 'ventriloquist illusion'. The present study examined how audio-visual temporal congruence influences the ventriloquist illusion and characterized its neural underpinnings with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Behaviorally, the ventriloquist illusion was reduced for asynchronous versus synchronous audio-visual stimuli, in accordance with previous reports. Neural activity patterns associated with the ventriloquist effect were consistently observed in the planum temporale (PT), with a reduction in illusion-related fMRI-signals ipsilateral to visual stimulation for central sounds perceived peripherally and a contralateral increase in illusion-related fMRI-signals for peripheral sounds perceived centrally. Moreover, it was found that separate but adjacent regions within the PT were preferentially activated for ventriloquist illusions produced by synchronous and asynchronous audio-visual stimulation. We conclude that the left-right balance of neural activity in the PT represents the neural code that underlies the ventriloquist illusion, with greater activity in the cerebral hemisphere contralateral to the direction of the perceived shift of sound location.

Direct targeting of the thalamic anteroventral nucleus for deep brain stimulation by T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging at 3 T.

BACKGROUND: The thalamic anteroventral nucleus (AV) is a promising target structure for deep brain stimulation (DBS) in patients suffering from refractory epilepsy. Direct visualization of the AV would improve spatial accuracy in functional stereotactic neurosurgery for treatment of this disease. METHODS: On 3-tesla magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), acquisition parameters were adjusted for optimal demarcation of the AV in 1 healthy subject. Reliability of AV visualization was then evaluated in 5 healthy individuals and 3 patients with refractory epilepsy. RESULTS: In all individuals, an adjusted T1-weighted sequence allowed for demarcation of the AV. It was clearly distinguishable from hyperintense myelin-rich lamellae surrounding it ventrally and laterally and appeared hypo-intense compared to the adjacent thalamic nuclei. Image resolution and contrast facilitated direct stereotactic targeting of the AV prior to DBS surgery in all 3 patients. CONCLUSIONS: Direct targeting of the AV can be achieved, which has immediate implications for the accuracy of MRI-guided DBS in patients with refractory epilepsy.

Detection of physiological noise in resting state fMRI using machine learning.

We present a technique for predicting cardiac and respiratory phase on a time point by time point basis, from fMRI image data. These predictions have utility in attempts to detrend effects of the physiological cycles from fMRI image data. We demonstrate the technique both in the case where it can be trained on a subject's own data, and when it cannot. The prediction scheme uses a multiclass support vector machine algorithm. Predictions are demonstrated to have a close fit to recorded physiological phase, with median Pearson correlation scores between recorded and predicted values of 0.99 for the best case scenario (cardiac cycle trained on a subject's own data) down to 0.83 for the worst case scenario (respiratory predictions trained on group data), as compared to random chance correlation score of 0.70. When predictions were used with RETROICOR--a popular physiological noise removal tool--the effects are compared to using recorded phase values. Using Fourier transforms and seed based correlation analysis, RETROICOR is shown to produce similar effects whether recorded physiological phase values are used, or they are predicted using this technique. This was seen by similar levels of noise reduction noise in the same regions of the Fourier spectra, and changes in seed based correlation scores in similar regions of the brain. This technique has a use in situations where data from direct monitoring of the cardiac and respiratory cycles are incomplete or absent, but researchers still wish to reduce this source of noise in the image data.

Recognition of face-name associations after errorless and errorful learning: an fMRI study.

BACKGROUND: Errorless learning has advantages over errorful learning. The erroneous items produced during errorful learning compete with correct items at retrieval resulting in decreased memory performance. This interference is associated with an increased demand on executive monitoring processes. Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to contrast errorless and errorful learning. Learning mode was manipulated by the number of distractors during learning of face-name associations: in errorless learning only the correct name was introduced. During errorful learning either one incorrect name or two incorrect names were additionally introduced in order to modulate the interference in recognition. RESULTS: The behavioural results showed an enhanced memory performance after errorless learning. The veridicality of recognition of the face-name associations was reflected in a left lateralized fronto-temporal-parietal network. The different learning modes were associated with modulations in left prefrontal and parietal regions. CONCLUSIONS: Errorless learning enhances memory performance as compared to errorful learning and underpins the known advantages for errorless learning. During memory retrieval different networks are engaged for specific purposes: Recognition of face-name associations engaged a lateralized fronto-temporal-parietal network and executive monitoring processes of memory engaged the left prefrontal and parietal regions.

Sonography of the median nerve in CMT1A, CMT2A, CMTX, and HNPP.

INTRODUCTION: In this study we compare the ultrasound features in the median nerve in patients with different types of Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) disease and hereditary neuropathies with liability to pressure palsies (HNPP) as a typical entrapment neuropathy. METHODS: Median nerve ultrasound and conduction studies were performed in patients with CMT1A (n = 12), MFN2-associated CMT2A (n = 7), CMTX (n = 5), and HNPP (n = 5), and in controls (n = 28). RESULTS: Median nerve cross-sectional area (CSA) was significantly increased in CMT1A, whereas, in axonal CMT2A, fascicle diameter (FD) was enlarged. CSA correlated with nerve conduction slowing in CMT1A and with axonal loss, as shown by motor and sensory nerve amplitudes in both CMT1A and CMT2A. A relatively low wrist-to-forearm-ratio (WFR <0.8) or a relatively high WFR (>1.8) appeared to be unlikely in MFN2 and Cx32 mutations of CMT2A and CMTX, respectively. CONCLUSION: Differences in CSA, FD, and WFR of the median nerve can be helpful in defining subtypes of hereditary neuropathies.

Decreased functional connectivity in patients with major depressive disorder and a history of childhood traumatization through experiences of abuse.

BACKGROUND: Childhood trauma (CT) increases vulnerability for the development of major depressive disorder (MDD). Alterations in resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) have frequently been reported for MDD. These alterations may be much more prominent in depressive patients with a history of CT. The present study aims to compare RSFC in different brain networks of patients with MDD and CT (MDD+CT) vs. MDD and no CT compared to healthy controls. METHODS: 45 patients (22 with CT) were compared to 23 age-and-gender-matched healthy control subjects. Demographic parameters, severity of MDD, severity of CT and comorbid anxiety disorders were assessed. For assessment of RSFC alterations, a seed-based approach within five well-established RSFC networks was used. RESULTS: CT in MDD patients predicts severity of comorbid anxiety. A significant decrease in in-between network RSFC-values of MDD patients compared to controls was found in the network pairs of default mode network (DMN) - dorsal attention network (DAN), ventral attention network (VAN) - DMN and DAN - affective network (AN). MDD+CT patients presented more aberrant RSFC than MDD-CT patients. MDD scores predicted the decrease in RSFC for MDD patients. Higher Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ) scores are linked to reduced functional connectivity (FC) between DMN - DAN. CONCLUSIONS: Our study shows reduced RSFC in MDD patients for DMN - DAN, VAN - DMN, DAN - AN and MDD+CT patients presented more aberrant RSFC so that we suspect CT to be a considerable factor in the etiology of MDD. Through dysregulated neural circuits, CT is likely to contribute to a distinct MDD pathophysiology.

Long-term cortisol stress response in depression and comorbid anxiety is linked with reduced N-acetylaspartate in the anterior cingulate cortex.

OBJECTIVES: Major Depression (MDD) and anxiety disorders are stress-related disorders that share pathophysiological mechanisms. There is evidence for alterations of glutamate-glutamine, N-acetylaspartate (NAA) and GABA in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a stress-sensitive region affected by hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA). The aim was to investigate metabolic alterations in the ACC and whether hair cortisol, current stress or early life adversity predict them. METHODS: We investigated 22 patients with MDD and comorbid anxiety disorder and 23 healthy controls. Proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy was performed with voxels placed in pregenual (pg) and dorsal (d) ACC in 3 T. Analysis of hair cortisol was performed using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). RESULTS: The N-acetylaspartate/Creatin ratio (NAA/Cr) was reduced in patients in both pgACC (p = .040) and dACC (p = .016). A significant interactive effect of diagnosis and cortisol on both pg-NAA/Cr (F = 5.00, p = .033) and d-NAA/Cr (F = 7.86, p = .009) was detected, whereby in controls cortisol was positively correlated with d-NAA/Cr (r = 0.61, p = .004). CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest a relationship between NAA metabolism in ACC and HPA axis activity as represented by long-term cortisol output.

Altered brain activity during emotional empathy in somatoform disorder.

Somatoform disorder patients suffer from impaired emotion recognition and other emotional deficits. Emotional empathy refers to the understanding and sharing of emotions of others in social contexts. It is likely that the emotional deficits of somatoform disorder patients are linked to disturbed empathic abilities; however, little is known so far about empathic deficits of somatoform patients and the underlying neural mechanisms. We used fMRI and an empathy paradigm to investigate 20 somatoform disorder patients and 20 healthy controls. The empathy paradigm contained facial pictures expressing anger, joy, disgust, and a neutral emotional state; a control condition contained unrecognizable stimuli. In addition, questionnaires testing for somatization, alexithymia, depression, empathy, and emotion recognition were applied. Behavioral results confirmed impaired emotion recognition in somatoform disorder and indicated a rather distinct pattern of empathic deficits of somatoform patients with specific difficulties in "empathic distress." In addition, somatoform patients revealed brain areas with diminished activity in the contrasts "all emotions"-"control," "anger"-"control," and "joy"-"control," whereas we did not find brain areas with altered activity in the contrasts "disgust"-"control" and "neutral"-"control." Significant clusters with less activity in somatoform patients included the bilateral parahippocampal gyrus, the left amygdala, the left postcentral gyrus, the left superior temporal gyrus, the left posterior insula, and the bilateral cerebellum. These findings indicate that disturbed emotional empathy of somatoform disorder patients is linked to impaired emotion recognition and abnormal activity of brain regions responsible for emotional evaluation, emotional memory, and emotion generation.

Performance-related increases in hippocampal N-acetylaspartate (NAA) induced by spatial navigation training are restricted to BDNF Val homozygotes.

Recent evidence indicates experience-dependent brain volume changes in humans, but the functional and histological nature of such changes is unknown. Here, we report that adult men performing a cognitively demanding spatial navigation task every other day over 4 months display increases in hippocampal N-acetylaspartate (NAA) as measured with magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Unlike measures of brain volume, changes in NAA are sensitive to metabolic and functional aspects of neural and glia tissue and unlikely to reflect changes in microvasculature. Training-induced changes in NAA were, however, absent in carriers of the Met substitution in the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) gene, which is known to reduce activity-dependent secretion of BDNF. Among BDNF Val homozygotes, increases in NAA were strongly related to the degree of practice-related improvement in navigation performance and normalized to pretraining levels 4 months after the last training session. We conclude that changes in demands on spatial navigation can alter hippocampal NAA concentrations, confirming epidemiological studies suggesting that mental experience may have direct effects on neural integrity and cognitive performance. BDNF genotype moderates these plastic changes, in line with the contention that gene-context interactions shape the ontogeny of complex phenotypes.

Structural alterations in lateral prefrontal, parietal and posterior midline regions of men with chronic posttraumatic stress disorder.

BACKGROUND: So far, the neural network associated with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been suggested to mainly involve the amygdala, hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex. However, increasing evidence indicates that cortical regions extending beyond this network might also be implicated in the pathophysiology of PTSD. We aimed to investigate PTSD-related structural alterations in some of these regions. METHODS: We enrolled highly traumatized refugees with and without (traumatized controls) PTSD and nontraumatized controls in the study. To increase the validity of our results, we combined an automatic cortical parcellation technique and voxel-based morphometry. RESULTS: In all, 39 refugees (20 with and 19 without PTSD) and 13 controls participated in the study. Participants were middle-aged men who were free of psychoactive substances and consumed little to no alcohol. Patients with PTSD (and to a lesser extent traumatized controls) showed reduced volumes in the right inferior parietal cortex, the left rostral middle frontal cortex, the bilateral lateral orbitofrontal cortex and the bilateral isthmus of the cingulate. An influence of cumulative traumatic stress on the isthmus of the cingulate and the lateral orbitofrontal cortex indicated that, at least in these regions, structural alterations might be associated with repeated stress experiences. Voxel-based morphometry analyses produced largely consistent results, but because of a poorer signal-to-noise ratio, conventional statistics did not reach significance. LIMITATIONS: Although we controlled for several important confounding variables (e.g., sex, alcohol abuse) with our particular sample, this might limit the generalizibility of our data. Moreover, high comorbidity of PTSD and major depression hinders a definite separation of these conditions in our findings. Finally, the results concerning the lateral orbito frontal cortex should be interpreted with caution, as magnetic resonance imaging acquisition in this region is affected by a general signal loss. CONCLUSION: Our results indicate that lateral prefrontal, parietal and posterior midline structures are implicated in the pathophysiology of PTSD. As these regions are particularly involved in episodic memory, emotional processing and executive control, this might have important implications for the understanding of PTSD symptoms.

The effects of COMT (Val108/158Met) and DRD4 (SNP -521) dopamine genotypes on brain activations related to valence and magnitude of rewards.

People's sensitivity to reinforcing stimuli such as monetary gains and losses shows a wide interindividual variation that might in part be determined by genetic differences. Because of the established role of the dopaminergic system in the neural encoding of rewards and negative events, we investigated young healthy volunteers being homozygous for either the Valine or Methionine variant of the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) codon 158 polymorphism as well as homozygous for the C or T variant of the SNP -521 polymorphism of the dopamine D4 receptor. Participants took part in a gambling paradigm featuring unexpectedly high monetary gains and losses in addition to standard gains/losses of expected magnitude while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging at 3 T. Valence-related brain activations were seen in the ventral striatum, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the inferior parietal cortex. These activations were modulated by the COMT polymorphism with greater effects for valine/valine participants but not by the D4 receptor polymorphism. By contrast, magnitude-related effects in the anterior insula and the cingulate cortex were modulated by the D4 receptor polymorphism with larger responses for the CC variant. These findings emphasize the differential contribution of genetic variants in the dopaminergic system to various aspects of reward processing.

Mapping Visual Field Defects With fMRI - Impact of Approach and Experimental Conditions.

Current initiatives to restore vision emphasize the need for objective assessments of visual field (VF) defects as pursued with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) approaches. Here, we compared population receptive field (pRF) mapping-based VF reconstructions to an fMRI method that uses more robust visual stimulation (on-off block design) in combination with individualized anatomy-driven retinotopic atlas-information (atlas-based VF). We investigated participants with sizable peripheral VF-deficits due to advanced glaucoma (n = 4) or retinitis pigmentosa (RP; n = 2) and controls (n = 6) with simulated scotoma. We obtained (1) standard automated perimetry (SAP) data as reference VFs and 3T fMRI data for (2) pRF-mapping [8-direction bar stimulus, fixation color change task] and (3) block-design full-field stimulation [8-direction drifting contrast patterns during (a) passive viewing (PV) and (b) one-back-task (OBT; reporting successions of identical motion directions) to probe the impact of previously reported task-related unspecific visual cortex activations]. Correspondence measures between the SAP and fMRI-based VFs were accuracy, assisted by sensitivity and specificity. We found an accuracy of pRF-based VF from V1 in patients [median: 0.62] that was similar to previous reports and increased by adding V2 and V3 to the analysis [0.74]. In comparison to the pRF-based VF, equivalent accuracies were obtained for the atlas-based VF for both PV [0.67] and, unexpectedly, the OBT [0.59], where, however, unspecific cortical activations were reflected by a reduction in sensitivity [0.71 (PV) and 0.35 (OBT)]. In conclusion, in patients with peripheral VF-defects, we demonstrate that previous fMRI procedures to obtain VF-estimates might be enhanced by: (1) pooling V1-V3 to enhance accuracy; (2) reporting sensitivity and specificity measures to increase transparency of the VF-reconstruction metric; (3) applying atlas-based procedures, if pRF-based VFs are not available or difficult to obtain; and (4) giving, counter-intuitively, preference to PV. These findings are expected to provide guidance to overcome current limitations of translating fMRI-based methods to a clinical work-up.