Prefrontal and midline interactions mediating behavioural control - PubMed (original) (raw)

Prefrontal and midline interactions mediating behavioural control

Catherine Fassbender et al. Eur J Neurosci. 2009 Jan.

Abstract

Top-down control processes are thought to interact with bottom-up stimulus-driven task demands to facilitate the smooth execution of behaviour. Frontal and midline brain areas in humans are believed to subserve these control processes but their distinct roles and the interactions between them remain to be fully elucidated. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we utilized a GO/NO-GO task with cued and uncued inhibitory events to investigate the effect of cue-induced levels of top-down control on NO-GO trial response conflict. We found that, on a within-subjects, trial-for-trial basis, high levels of top-down control, as indexed by left dorsolateral prefrontal activation prior to the NO-GO, resulted in lower levels of activation on the NO-GO trial in the pre-supplementary motor area. These results suggest that prefrontal and midline regions work together to implement cognitive control and reveal that intra-subject variability is reflected in these lateral and midline interactions.

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Figures

Figure 1

Figure 1

Areas activated during cue periods prior to a correct response. Activated areas include pre-SMA (A, Talairach: x = 2, y = 10, z = 46), right (B, 41, 14, 27) and left (C, -28, -7, 48) dorsolateral PFC as well as left parietal, occipital and right temporal areas.

Figure 2

Figure 2

Method of defining high and low control STOP events. A. represents the regressor for cued successful STOPs during the initial analysis. As shown in B., activations during the cue period in left dorsolateral PFC were divided into low activations, or low control cue periods (represented by the green curve) and high activations, or high control cue periods (represented by the blue curve). Successful STOPs from the original regressor (A) were then classified as high or low control STOPs based upon the cue period immediately preceding them, as shown in B. Therefore, the blue arrows represent STOPs that were preceded by high control cue periods and are high control STOPs, whereas the green arrows represent STOPs that were preceded by low control cue periods and are low control STOPs.

Figure 3

Figure 3

Correct inhibition activations from the left dorsolateral PFC split (A (i): pre-SMA (0, 1, 58), SMA (1, -11, 59) and (ii): rostral ACC (-2, 30, 28), caudal ACC (1, 13, 26)) and from the right dorsolateral PFC split (B (i): ACC (-2, 31, 26) and (ii): rostral SMA (1, -3, 60), caudal SMA (1, -18, 65)). Areas in which activation differed significantly between high and low control conditions are displayed in green.

Figure 4

Figure 4

A: Mean activation in pre-SMA, rostral ACC and dorsal ACC for high and low control events as defined by the left dorsolateral PFC. B: Mean activation in ACC and rostral SMA and caudal SMA for high and low control events defined by the right dorsolateral PFC.

Figure 5

Figure 5

An area activated during errors in this task (from Hester et al, 2004b), including ACC extending into dorsal ACC, is represented in yellow. Pre-SMA, implicated in response-conflict monitoring in this study, is displayed in green. Orange represents the small area of overlap in pre-SMA between the two clusters. We found no evidence for any conflict-related activity in ACC, even at a liberal threshold.

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