Abstract
Literatures have shown that Internet gaming disorder (IGD) subjects show impaired executive control and enhanced reward sensitivities than healthy controls. However, how these two networks jointly affect the valuation process and drive IGD subjects' online-game-seeking behaviors remains unknown. Thirty-five IGD and 36 healthy controls underwent a resting-states scan in the MRI scanner. Functional connectivity (FC) was examined within control and reward network seeds regions, respectively. Nucleus accumbens (NAcc) was selected as the node to find the interactions between these two networks. IGD subjects show decreased FC in the executive control network and increased FC in the reward network when comparing with the healthy controls. When examining the correlations between the NAcc and the executive control/reward networks, the link between the NAcc - executive control network is negatively related with the link between NAcc - reward network. The changes (decrease/increase) in IGD subjects' brain synchrony in control/reward networks suggest the inefficient/overly processing within neural circuitry underlying these processes. The inverse proportion between control network and reward network in IGD suggest that impairments in executive control lead to inefficient inhibition of enhanced cravings to excessive online game playing. This might shed light on the mechanistic understanding of IGD.
Highlights
Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging studies identified two important neuronal activity patterns in Internet gaming disorder (IGD): First, reduced response inhibitions were demonstrated in the IGD subjects using go/no-go[8], task switching[9,10], and the Stroop[11,12,13] tasks compared with healthy controls (HC); Second, IGD subjects showed enhanced reward sensitivity than HC2,14,15 and showed cognitive bias toward information derived from the Internet[9,16,17]
The Functional connectivity (FC) in control network in HC is significant higher than that in IGD, at both the whole brain and the hemispheric levels (HC is marginally significant than IGD in the FC in left control network)
Task based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies demonstrated that IGD subjects showed reduced response inhibitions than healthy controls[8,9,11,12]
Summary
Literatures have shown that Internet gaming disorder (IGD) subjects show impaired executive control and enhanced reward sensitivities than healthy controls. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies identified two important neuronal activity patterns in IGD: First, reduced response inhibitions were demonstrated in the IGD subjects using go/no-go[8], task switching[9,10], and the Stroop[11,12,13] tasks compared with healthy controls (HC); Second, IGD subjects showed enhanced reward sensitivity than HC2,14,15 and showed cognitive bias toward information derived from the Internet[9,16,17] These two features are much similar to the findings from current neuro-economic studies– There are two distinct brain networks that jointly influence decision-making processes[18,19]: The executive control network (involves the lateral prefrontal and parietal cortices19), which is related to delayed rewards; The ventral valuation network (involves the orbitofrontal cortex, ventral striatum and so on19,20), mediates for immediate rewards. A Fisher’s r-to-z transformation was applied to each correlation map to obtain an approximately normal distribution of the functional connectivity values and to apply parametric statistics
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