NeuroImage最新文献

Linguistic communication is often considered as an action serving the function of conveying the speaker's goal to the addressee. Although neuroimaging studies have suggested a role of the motor system in comprehending communicative functions, the underlying mechanism is yet to be specified. Here, by two EEG experiments and a tACS experiment, we demonstrate that the frontocentral beta oscillation, which represents action states, plays a crucial part in linguistic communication understanding. Participants read scripts involving two interlocutors and rated the interlocutors’ attitudes. Each script included a critical sentence said by the speaker expressing a context-dependent function of either promise, request, or reply to the addressee's query. These functions were behaviorally discriminated, with higher addressee's will rating for the promise than for the reply and higher speaker's will rating for the request than for the reply. EEG multivariate analyses showed that different communicative functions were represented by different patterns of the frontocentral beta activity but not by patterns of alpha activity. Further tACS results showed that, relative to alpha tACS and sham stimulation, beta tACS improved the predictability of communicative functions of request or reply, as measured by the speaker's will rating. These results convergently suggest a causal role of the frontocentral beta activities in comprehending linguistic communications.

Despite the potential link between stress-induced reward dysfunctions and the development of mental problems, limited human research has investigated the specific impacts of chronic stress on the dynamics of reward processing. Here we aimed to investigate the relationship between chronic academic stress and the dynamics of reward processing (i.e., reward anticipation and reward consumption) using event-related potential (ERP) technology. Ninety healthy undergraduates who were preparing for the National Postgraduate Entrance Examination (NPEE) participated in the study and completed a two-door reward task, their chronic stress levels were assessed via the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS). The results showed that a lower magnitude of reward elicited more negative amplitudes of cue-N2 during the anticipatory phase, and reward omission elicited more negative amplitudes of FRN compared to reward delivery especially in high reward conditions during the consummatory phase. More importantly, the PSS score exhibited a U-shaped relationship with cue-N2 amplitudes regardless of reward magnitude during the anticipatory phase; and FRN amplitudes toward reward omission in high reward condition during the consummatory phase. These findings suggest that individuals exposed to either low or high levels of chronic stress, as opposed to moderate stress levels, exhibited a heightened reward anticipation, and an augmented violation of expectations or affective response when faced with relatively more negative outcomes.

Third-party punishment (TPP) plays an irreplaceable role in maintaining social fairness. Punishment power is a significant area of study within economic games. However, the impact of whether or not the second-party possesses punishment power on TPP remains unexplored. The present study utilizes the high temporal resolution of EEG and time-frequency analysis, intra-barin functional connectivity analysis, inter-brain synchronization (IBS) analysis, and granger causality analysis(GCA) to comprehensively explore the neural mechanism of TPP from the perspective of third-party individual's decision-making and IBS in the real-time social interaction. Time-frequency results found that, the absence of the punishment power activated more theta-band and alpha-band power compare to when second-party has punishment power. When second-party has no punishment power, functional connection results observed stronger functional connectivity in theta band for medium unfair offers between rTPJ and PFC. Dual-brain analysis revealed that when the second-party has no punishment power, there is a significantly higher IBS in the alpha band between the frontal and frontal-central lobes of the second-party and the parietal and parietal occipital lobes of the third-party. GCA results further showed that the direction of IBS from third-party to second-party was significantly stronger than from second-party to third-party. This study demonstrates that the absence of the second-party's punishment power promote TPP, and similar cognitive process of thinking on how to maintain social fairness enhances IBS. The current study emphasizes the influence of punishment power on TPP, broadens the research perspective and contributes crucial insights into maintain social fairness.

Individuals’ affective experience can be intricate, influenced by various factors including monetary rewards and social factors during social interaction. However, within this array of factors, divergent evidence has been considered as potential contributors to social anxiety. To gain a better understanding of the specific factors associated with anxiety during social interaction, we combined a social interaction task with neurophysiological recordings obtained through an anxiety-elicitation task conducted in a Virtual Reality (VR) environment. Employing inter-subject representational similarity analysis (ISRSA), we explored the potential linkage between individuals’ anxiety neural patterns and their affective experiences during social interaction. Our findings suggest that, after controlling for other factors, the influence of the partner's emotional cues on individuals’ affective experiences is specifically linked to their neural pattern of anxiety. This indicates that the emergence of anxiety during social interaction may be particularly associated with the emotional cues provided by the social partner, rather than individuals’ own reward or prediction errors during social interaction. These results provide further support for the cognitive theory of social anxiety and extend the application of VR in future cognitive and affective studies.

Congenital blindness offers a unique opportunity to investigate human brain plasticity. The influence of congenital visual loss on the asymmetry of the structural network remains poorly understood. To address this question, we recruited 21 participants with congenital blindness (CB) and 21 age-matched sighted controls (SCs). Employing diffusion and structural magnetic resonance imaging, we constructed hemispheric white matter (WM) networks using deterministic fiber tractography and applied graph theory methodologies to assess topological efficiency (i.e., network global efficiency, network local efficiency, and nodal local efficiency) within these networks. Statistical analyses revealed a consistent leftward asymmetry in global efficiency across both groups. However, a different pattern emerged in network local efficiency, with the CB group exhibiting a symmetric state, while the SC group showed a leftward asymmetry. Specifically, compared to the SC group, the CB group exhibited a decrease in local efficiency in the left hemisphere, which was caused by a reduction in the nodal properties of some key regions mainly distributed in the left occipital lobe. Furthermore, interhemispheric tracts connecting these key regions exhibited significant structural changes primarily in the splenium of the corpus callosum. This result confirms the initial observation that the reorganization in asymmetry of the WM network following congenital visual loss is associated with structural changes in the corpus callosum. These findings provide novel insights into the neuroplasticity and adaptability of the brain, particularly at the network level.

Throughout history, various odors have been harnessed to invigorate or relax the mind. The mechanisms underlying odors’ diverse arousal effects remain poorly understood. We conducted five experiments (184 participants) to investigate this issue, using pupillometry, electroencephalography, and the attentional blink paradigm, which exemplifies the limit in attentional capacity. Results demonstrated that exposure to citral, compared to vanillin, enlarged pupil size, reduced resting-state alpha oscillations and alpha network efficiency, augmented beta-gamma oscillations, and enhanced the coordination between parietal alpha and frontal beta-gamma activities. In parallel, it attenuated the attentional blink effect. These effects were observed despite citral and vanillin being comparable in perceived odor intensity, pleasantness, and nasal pungency, and were unlikely driven by semantic biases. Our findings reveal that odors differentially alter the small-worldness of brain network architecture, and thereby brain state and arousal. Furthermore, they establish arousal as a unique dimension in olfactory space, distinct from intensity and pleasantness.

Working Memory (WM) requires maintenance of task-relevant information and suppression of task-irrelevant/distracting information. Alpha and theta oscillations have been extensively investigated in relation to WM. However, studies that examine both theta and alpha bands in relation to distractors, encompassing not only power modulation but also connectivity modulation, remain scarce. Here, we depicted, at the EEG-source level, the increase in power and connectivity in theta and alpha bands induced by strong relative to weak distractors during a visual Sternberg-like WM task involving the encoding of verbal items. During retention, a strong or weak distractor was presented, predictable in time and nature. Analysis focused on the encoding and retention phases before distractor presentation. Theta and alpha power were computed in cortical regions of interest, and connectivity networks estimated via spectral Granger causality and synthetized using in/out degree indices. The following modulations were observed for strong vs. weak distractors. In theta band during encoding, the power in frontal regions increased, together with frontal-to-frontal and bottom-up occipital-to-temporal-to-frontal connectivity; even during retention, bottom-up theta connectivity increased. In alpha band during retention, but not during encoding, the power in temporal-occipital regions increased, together with top-down frontal-to-occipital and temporal-to-occipital connectivity. From our results, we postulate a proactive cooperation between theta and alpha mechanisms: the first would mediate enhancement of target representation both during encoding and retention, and the second would mediate increased inhibition of sensory areas during retention only, to suppress the processing of imminent distractor without interfering with the processing of ongoing target stimulus during encoding.

Accurate diagnosis of mental disorders is expected to be achieved through the identification of reliable neuroimaging biomarkers with the help of cutting-edge feature selection techniques. However, existing feature selection methods often fall short in capturing the local structural characteristics among samples and effectively eliminating redundant features, resulting in inadequate performance in disorder prediction. To address this gap, we propose a novel supervised method named local-structure-preservation and redundancy-removal-based feature selection (LRFS), and then apply it to the identification of meaningful biomarkers for schizophrenia (SZ). LRFS method leverages graph-based regularization to preserve original sample similarity relationships during data transformation, thus retaining crucial local structure information. Additionally, it introduces redundancy-removal regularization based on interrelationships among features to exclude similar and redundant features from high-dimensional data. Moreover, LRFS method incorporates $l_{2,1}$ sparse regularization that enables selecting a sparse and noise-robust feature subset. Experimental evaluations on eight public datasets with diverse properties demonstrate the superior performance of our method over nine popular feature selection methods in identifying discriminative features, with average classification accuracy gains ranging from 1.30 % to 9.11 %. Furthermore, the LRFS method demonstrates superior discriminability in four functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) datasets from 708 healthy controls (HCs) and 537 SZ patients, with an average increase in classification accuracy ranging from 1.89 % to 9.24 % compared to other nine methods. Notably, our method reveals reproducible and significant changes in SZ patients relative to HCs across the four datasets, predominantly in the thalamus-related functional network connectivity, which exhibit a significant correlation with clinical symptoms. Convergence analysis, parameter sensitivity analysis, and ablation studies further demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method. In short, our proposed feature selection method effectively identifies discriminative and reliable features that hold the potential to be biomarkers, paving the way for the elucidation of brain abnormalities and the advancement of precise diagnosis of mental disorders.

Understanding the correct intention of a speaker is critical for social interaction. Speech prosody is an important source for understanding speakers' intentions during verbal communication. However, the neural dynamics by which the human brain translates the prosodic cues into a mental representation of communicative intentions in real time remains unclear. Here, we recorded EEG (electroencephalograph) while participants listened to dialogues. The prosodic features of the critical words at the end of sentences were manipulated to signal either suggestion, warning, or neutral intentions. The results showed that suggestion and warning intentions evoked enhanced late positive event-related potentials (ERPs) compared to the neutral condition. Linear mixed-effects model (LMEM) regression and representational similarity analysis (RSA) analyses revealed that these ERP effects were distinctively correlated with prosodic acoustic analysis, emotional valence evaluation, and intention interpretation in different time windows; The onset latency significantly increased as the processing level of abstractness and communicative intentionality increased. Neural representations of intention and emotional information emerged and parallelly persisted over a long time window, guiding the correct identification of communicative intention. These results provide new insights into understanding the structural components of intention processing and their temporal neural dynamics underlying communicative intention comprehension from speech prosody in online social interactions.