Brain Response Patterns Research Articles

Reward activation in childhood predicts adolescent substance use initiation in a high-risk sample

BackgroundSubstance use at an early age conveys substantial risk for later substance-related problems. A better understanding of early risk factors could result in more timely and effective intervention. This study investigated the predictive utility of the brain’s response to reward anticipation as a risk factor for early substance use initiation. MethodsParticipants were 34 children (25 male) at high risk for alcohol and other substance use disorders from a longitudinal functional magnetic resonance imaging study, scanned at a mean age of 10.5 years (SD = 1.2) when participants were substance-naïve. We used a monetary incentive delay task to examine the hemodynamic response of the nucleus accumbens to gain and loss anticipation. Logistic regression was used to test the hypothesis that these brain response patterns would have predictive utility over and above early externalizing behaviors and family history of substance use disorder, two key risk factors for substance use problems, in differentiating those who initiated substance use before age 16 (n = 18) and those who did not (n = 16). ResultsGreater nucleus accumbens activation during monetary gain anticipation in childhood increased the likelihood of initiating substance use during early adolescence (p = .023). The model that comprised neural data in addition to early externalizing behaviors and family history showed significantly better fit than the model without neural data (χ22 = 7.38, p = .025). ConclusionsHeightened gain anticipation activation in the nucleus accumbens may predispose individuals to early substance use, beyond the risk conveyed by other known factors.

PB9. The ‘functional magnetic resonance imaging’ (fMRI) as a meaningful tool for the differentiation of sexual preferences

Context The research network ‘ Ne ural mechanisms u nderlying p edophilia and sexual offending against children: origins, assessment and therapy’ investigates mechanisms of sexual abuse of children and pedophilia by means of fMRI imaging, clinical interviews, and psychological testing. While pedophiles’ sexual fantasies refer to pre-pubertal children of the first Tanner Stage ( Tanner, 1978 ), hebephilic men prefer partners who are in puberty (Tanner Stage 2–3) ( Blanchard et al., 2009 ). But whether hebephilia can be seen as an independent entity is still controversial. Our previous research showed that the functional brain response patterns to sexual stimuli contain sufficient information to identify pedophiles (compared to teleiophiles) with a mean accuracy of 95% ( Ponseti, 2012 ). However, the treatment relies on a precise measurement of the sexual orientation. To this end, we tested whether standard second level analysis of brain responses to sexual stimuli and/ or whole brain calculations of BOLD-responses to sexual stimuli are useful to differentiate between pedophiles and hebephiles. Design During fMRI, participants (n = 328) were shown same- and opposite-sex images of nude children and adults in Tanner stages 1–5. The images were each shown for one second with a variable inter-stimulus interval of two seconds on average. The previous classification was based on clinical interviews, self-reported details (like sexual/masturbating fantasies) or according to criminal/medical records. We calculated differences in BOLD-signals for the sexual stimuli in the corresponding contrast images (i.e.one hebephiles’ contrast image was defined as ‘pubertal boy/girl’), as well as a whole brain functional BOLD response to each stimulus category. Results Preference specific brain activity was found in hebephilic as well in pedophilic participants in areas known to be involved in sexual stimulus processing. Conclusion Here we present evidence that whole brain response calculation provides a meaningful measure of sexual preferences in healthy and in paraphilic males. Particularly, response differences between pedophilic and hebephilic participants provide evidence that these clinical categories differ at the level of brain function.

2288 Neural correlates of face processing in autism spectrum disorder: A quantitative meta-analysis of current literature and future directions

OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) affects 1 in 68 people and includes restricted, repetitive behavior, and social communication deficits. Aspects of face processing (i.e., identity, emotion perception) are impaired in some with ASD. Neuroimaging studies have shown aberrant patterns of brain activation and connectivity of face processing regions. However, small sample sizes and inconsistent results have hindered clinical utility of these findings. The study aims to establish consistent patterns of brain responses to faces in ASD and provide directions for future research. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Neuroimaging studies were identified through a multi-database search according to PRISMA guidelines. In total, 23 studies were retained for a sample size of 383 healthy controls and 345 ASD. Peak coordinates were extracted for activation likelihood estimation (ALE) in GingerALE v2.3.6. Follow-up ALE analyses investigated directed Versus undirected gaze, static Versus dynamic, emotional Versus neutral, and familiar Versus unfamiliar faces. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Faces produced bilateral activation of the fusiform gyrus (FG) in healthy controls (−42 −52 −20; 22 −74 −12, p<0.05, FDR) and left FG activation in ASD (−42 −54 −16, p<0.05, FDR). Activation in both groups was lateral to the mid-fusiform sulcus. Follow-up results pending. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: Reduced right FG activation to faces may inform biomarker or response to intervention studies. Mid-fusiform sulcus proved a reliable predictor of functional divides should be investigated on a subject-specific level.

Altered Brain Regional Homogeneity Following Electro-Acupuncture Stimulation at Sanyinjiao (SP6) in Women With Premenstrual Syndrome.

Background: Premenstrual syndrome (PMS) is a menstrual cycle-related disorder which causes physical and mood changes prior to menstruation and is associated with the functional dysregulation of the brain. Acupuncture is an effective alternative therapy for treating PMS, and sanyinjiao (SP6) is one of the most common acupoints used for improving the symptoms of PMS. However, the mechanism behind acupuncture’s efficacy for relieving PMS symptoms remains unclear. The aim of this study was to identify the brain response patterns induced by acupuncture at acupoint SP6 in patients with PMS.Materials and Methods: Twenty-three females with PMS were enrolled in this study. All patients underwent resting-state fMRI data collection before and after 6 min of electroacupuncture stimulation (EAS) at SP6. A regional homogeneity (ReHo) approach was used to compare patients’ brain responses before and after EAS at SP6 using REST software. The present study was registered at http://www.chictr.org.cn, and the Clinical Trial Registration Number is ChiCTR-OPC-15005918.Results: EAS at SP6 elicited decreased ReHo value at the bilateral precuneus, right inferior frontal cortex (IFC) and left middle frontal cortex (MFC). In contrast, increased ReHo value was found at the bilateral thalamus, bilateral insula, left putamen and right primary somatosensory cortex (S1).Conclusions: Our study provides an underlying neuroimaging evidence that the aberrant neural activity of PMS patients could be regulated by acupuncture at SP6.

P.3.018 - Distinctive neural response towards certain and conditional monetary loss in adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder

Introduction The neural response towards cues signalling monetary gain and loss has been extensively studied through the Monetary Incentive Delay (MID) task [1]. Abnormalities in reward processing have been found in adolescents and adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Anticipation of loss is often directly compared against anticipation of gain to represent the trade-off between positive and negative outcomes. In daily life situations, these events occur independently from each other and monetary loss can be escapable. We used an adaptation of the MID functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) task to assess the specific brain response pattern of typically developing adolescents and adolescents with ADHD towards monetary loss, representing a common social penalty. Methods Thirty-nine right-handed male adolescents with ADHD and 33 age-matched controls (9-18 years) performed a reaction time task under three conditions: (i) on Certain Loss trials, a monetary loss of €0.20, €1, or €5 occurred irrespective of response speed, (ii) on Conditional Loss trials, monetary loss could be avoided when responding in time, and (iii) on No Loss trials, no money could be lost. Participants started with €150 and were told that they could take home the remainder after 135 trials. The game was set that 4/5 of the start amount was lost. fMRI BOLD responses were acquired to compare anticipatory brain activation following the different cue types. Standard preprocessing and statistical analysis was performed in Statistical Parametric Mapping 12 (Wellcome department of Neuroimaging, London, UK). Repeated-measures ANOVA’s examined the effects of condition (certain loss, conditional loss, no loss) as a within subject factor and group (ADHD, controls) as a between subject factor on reaction time (RT). To examine the effects of monetary level on these variables further ANOVAs were conducted with monetary value (€0.20, €1, €5) and task condition (certain loss, conditional loss) as within-subject factors, and group as a between-subject factor. Post-hoc t-tests were used to explore significant interaction effects, when appropriate Results RTs were significantly (p No Loss contrast. In the ADHD group, conditional loss cues elicited an unusually strong pattern of activation within brain regions known, more generally, to be implicated in the processing of aversive events. Conclusions We provide some of the first evidence of a distinctive brain pattern between conditional and certain monetary loss in adolescents with ADHD compared to typically developing controls. The identification of such contingencies can provide more insight how adolescents respond to monetary loss in daily life.

Brain response patterns to economic inequity predict present and future depression indices.

Widening economic inequity has been suggested to associate with depression. However, little is known about the underlying neural mechanisms of this link. Here, we demonstrate that functional magnetic resonance imaging activity patterns in the amygdala and hippocampus induced by the inequity between the self and other rewards during an economic game can predict participants' present and future (measured one year later) depression indices. Such predictions were not possible using participant's behavioural and socio-economic status measures. These findings suggest that sensitivity to economic inequity has a critical effect on human mood states, and the amygdala and hippocampus play a key role in individual differences in the effect.

When birds and sias fly: A neural indicator of inferring a word meaning in context

Inference generation is a crucial skill in language comprehension. Recent research suggests that readers use both the contents from prior written text and their background knowledge, stored in long-term memory, to generate predictive inferences about what will come up next in a sentence. We recorded Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to examine the reader's ability to make online inferences even in the presence of pseudowords (orthographically legal, but meaningless letter strings), that is, in the presence of referents with no a priori match to vocabulary stored knowledge. As expected, a large and sustained negativity (250–900ms) was elicited by the target word ‘fly’ when preceded by the pseudoword ‘Sias’ in the sentence ‘Sias fly.’ relative to when preceded by ‘Birds’ in the sentence ‘Birds fly’. However, when readers were provided with an initial statement inviting to make an inference: ‘Sias have wings’, the word ‘fly’ in ‘Sias fly’ only elicited a negative voltage deflection over 100ms period (250–350), rapidly falling down to baseline. This result indicates that participants rapidly generated online inferences even with a hindered access to a referent's meaning (i.e. not knowing what ‘Sias’ are). Remarkably, brainwave traces to the access to a word's meaning in long-term memory (access to a well-known fact such as ‘Birds fly’) only diverged from ERPs for an inferred-from-reading knowledge (‘Sias fly’) for 100ms. We conclude that a fundamental search for across sentence coherence drives fast inference making processes in reading tasks. This pattern of brain response is critical to understand the rapid acquisition of new vocabulary when learning first and second languages.

P 102 Domain-specific effects of transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) on auditory feature processing

Theoretical background Decoding acoustic speech signals requires to parse the acoustic stream into linguistically meaningful units, and to extract stress and prosody. Accordingly, the temporal and spectral resolution of the auditory cortex is essential in successful speech processing ( Rosen, 1992 ). The reduced acuity in discriminating these features is considered as key factor in dyslexia ( Goswami, 2011 ) but is also a consequence of normal aging ( Walton, 2010 ). Transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS), a non-invasive brain stimulation technique that applies weak currents at multiple frequencies, is assumed to modulate the excitability of neural assemblies and, in consequence, the reactivity of cortical structures. However, the effect of tRNS on the auditory system is yet unclear. The present study aimed to fill this gap by investigating the impact of tRNS on basic auditory feature processing. Considering the hemispheric specialization of the auditory system in analyzing theses features we hypothesized that a site-specific tRNS application leads to domain-specific changes in auditory features processing. In concrete, tRNS over the left auditory cortex (lAC) was hypothesized to affect the temporal domain while tRNS over the right auditory cortex (rAC) was assumed to modulate the spectral domain. Finally, we investigated whether tRNS over bilateral auditory cortex (bAC) leads to a modulation of both dimensions. Methods On four days 18 healthy, right-handed adults received 30 min. tRNS at an intensity of 1.5 mA either over the lAC, over the rAC, over bAC or sham stimulation while continuous EEG was recorded. The task consisted of the detection of a deviant tone in a sequence of three sine wave tones. While the duration of all tones and the pitch of the standard tones was kept stable, the inter-tone interval (temporal information) and the frequency in that the deviant tone differed from the standard tones (spectral information) was modulated. Results In result, we found that tRNS applied over the lAC and over bAC inferred with task performance. This effect was specifically modulated by the inter-tone interval between the tone triplets but not by the frequency of the deviant tone. On the electrophysiological level, this finding was paralleled by feature-specific brain response patterns in the alpha and the lower gamma band. Discussion Our findings demonstrate the functional relevance of the lAC in processing temporal features. Most importantly, we proved tRNS as a valid technique to modulate basic auditory perception. The current results stress the need for further investigations on the effect of tRNS in the auditory domain. Systematically assessing the most effective stimulation parameters provides the basis for the clinical application of tRNS in the context of speech and language disorders.

Representational Similarity Mapping of Distributional Semantics in Left Inferior Frontal, Middle Temporal, and Motor Cortex.

Language comprehension engages a distributed network of frontotemporal, parietal, and sensorimotor regions, but it is still unclear how meaning of words and their semantic relationships are represented and processed within these regions and to which degrees lexico-semantic representations differ between regions and semantic types. We used fMRI and representational similarity analysis to relate word-elicited multivoxel patterns to semantic similarity between action and object words. In left inferior frontal (BA 44-45-47), left posterior middle temporal and left precentral cortex, the similarity of brain response patterns reflected semantic similarity among action-related verbs, as well as across lexical classes-between action verbs and tool-related nouns and, to a degree, between action verbs and food nouns, but not between action verbs and animal nouns. Instead, posterior inferior temporal cortex exhibited a reverse response pattern, which reflected the semantic similarity among object-related nouns, but not action-related words. These results show that semantic similarity is encoded by a range of cortical areas, including multimodal association (e.g., anterior inferior frontal, posterior middle temporal) and modality-preferential (premotor) cortex and that the representational geometries in these regions are partly dependent on semantic type, with semantic similarity among action-related words crossing lexical-semantic category boundaries.

Perception of Emotional Facial Expressions in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) at Behavioural and Brain Metabolic Level.

IntroductionAmyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) primarily impairs motor abilities but also affects cognition and emotional processing. We hypothesise that subjective ratings of emotional stimuli depicting social interactions and facial expressions is changed in ALS. It was found that recognition of negative emotions and ability to mentalize other’s intentions is reduced.MethodsProcessing of emotions in faces was investigated. A behavioural test of Ekman faces expressing six basic emotions was presented to 30 ALS patients and 29 age-, gender and education matched healthy controls. Additionally, a subgroup of 15 ALS patients that were able to lie supine in the scanner and 14 matched healthy controls viewed the Ekman faces during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Affective state and a number of daily social contacts were measured.ResultsALS patients recognized disgust and fear less accurately than healthy controls. In fMRI, reduced brain activity was seen in areas involved in processing of negative emotions replicating our previous results. During processing of sad faces, increased brain activity was seen in areas associated with social emotions in right inferior frontal gyrus and reduced activity in hippocampus bilaterally. No differences in brain activity were seen for any of the other emotional expressions. Inferior frontal gyrus activity for sad faces was associated with increased amount of social contacts of ALS patients.ConclusionALS patients showed decreased brain and behavioural responses in processing of disgust and fear and an altered brain response pattern for sadness. The negative consequences of neurodegenerative processes in the course of ALS might be counteracted by positive emotional activity and positive social interactions.

Emotional Experience and Awareness of Self: Functional MRI Studies of Depersonalization Disorder.

This paper presents functional MRI work on emotional processing in depersonalization disorder (DPD). This relatively neglected disorder is hallmarked by a disturbing change in the quality of first-person experience, almost invariably encompassing a diminished sense of self and an alteration in emotional experience such that the sufferer feels less emotionally reactive, with emotions experienced as decreased or “damped down,” so that emotional life seems to lack spontaneity and subjective validity. Here we explored responses to emotive visual stimuli to examine the functional neuroanatomy of emotional processing in DPD before and after pharmacological treatment. We also employed concurrent skin conductance measurement as an index of autonomic arousal. In common with previous studies we demonstrated that in DPD, there is attenuated psychophysiological response to emotional material, reflected in altered patterns of (i) regional brain response, (ii) autonomic responses. By scanning participants before and after treatment we were able to build on previous findings by examining the changes in functional MRI response in patients whose symptoms had improved at time 2. The attenuation of emotional experience was associated with reduced activity of the insula, whereas clinical improvement in DPD symptoms was associated with increased insula activity. The insula is known to be implicated in interoceptive awareness and the generation of feeling states. In addition an area of right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex emerged as particularly implicated in what may be “top-down” inhibition of emotional responses. The relevance of these findings to the wider study of emotion, self-related processes, and interoception is discussed.

The Connected Brain: Causality, models, and intrinsic dynamics

Recently, there have been several concerted international efforts - the BRAIN initiative, European Human Brain Project and the Human Connectome Project, to name a few - that hope to revolutionize our understanding of the connected brain. Over the past two decades, functional neuroimaging has emerged as the predominant technique in systems neuroscience. This is foreshadowed by an ever increasing number of publications on functional connectivity, causal modeling, connectomics, and multivariate analyses of distributed patterns of brain responses. In this article, we summarize pedagogically the (deep) history of brain mapping. We will highlight the theoretical advances made in the (dynamic) causal modelling of brain function - that may have escaped the wider audience of this article - and provide a brief overview of recent developments and interesting clinical applications. We hope that this article will engage the signal processing community by showcasing the inherently multidisciplinary nature of this important topic and the intriguing questions that are being addressed.

Brain response pattern identification of fMRI data using a particle swarm optimization-based approach

Many neuroscience studies have been devoted to understand brain neural responses correlating to cognition using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In contrast to univariate analysis to identify response patterns, it is shown that multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) of fMRI data becomes a relatively effective approach using machine learning techniques in the recent literature. MVPA can be considered as a multi-objective pattern classification problem with the aim to optimize response patterns, in which informative voxels interacting with each other are selected, achieving high classification accuracy associated with cognitive stimulus conditions. To solve the problem, we propose a feature interaction detection framework, integrating hierarchical heterogeneous particle swarm optimization and support vector machines, for voxel selection in MVPA. In the proposed approach, we first select the most informative voxels and then identify a response pattern based on the connectivity of the selected voxels. The effectiveness of the proposed approach was examined for the Haxby’s dataset of object-level representations. The computational results demonstrated higher classification accuracy by the extracted response patterns, compared to state-of-the-art feature selection algorithms, such as forward selection and backward selection.

A neurolinguistic study of South Swedish word accents: Electrical brain potentials in nouns and verbs

The brain response to words with correct and incorrect word accent–suffix combinations in South Swedish was investigated using electroencephalography (EEG). Accent 1 yielded an increased brain response (‘preactivation negativity’) that has previously been interpreted as reflecting preactivation of suffixes. Preactivation is greater for accent 1 due to its association with a limited set of suffixes, whereas accent 2 is default for compound words. The tonal realization of the word accent opposition in South Swedish is practically the mirror image of that in Central Swedish, where a similar preactivation negativity has been found. Therefore, the brain response is unlikely to result from a difference in acoustic features between the word accents. Invalidly cued suffixes yielded brain response pattern showing increased processing load of the unexpected suffix (negative electric potential) followed by its reprocessing (positivity ‘P600’).

A high-resolution 7-Tesla fMRI dataset from complex natural stimulation with an audio movie

Here we present a high-resolution functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) dataset – 20 participants recorded at high field strength (7 Tesla) during prolonged stimulation with an auditory feature film (“Forrest Gump”). In addition, a comprehensive set of auxiliary data (T1w, T2w, DTI, susceptibility-weighted image, angiography) as well as measurements to assess technical and physiological noise components have been acquired. An initial analysis confirms that these data can be used to study common and idiosyncratic brain response patterns to complex auditory stimulation. Among the potential uses of this dataset are the study of auditory attention and cognition, language and music perception, and social perception. The auxiliary measurements enable a large variety of additional analysis strategies that relate functional response patterns to structural properties of the brain. Alongside the acquired data, we provide source code and detailed information on all employed procedures – from stimulus creation to data analysis. In order to facilitate replicative and derived works, only free and open-source software was utilized.

Temporal profile of brain response to alprazolam in patients with generalized anxiety disorder

This study investigated the temporal pattern of brain response to emotional stimuli during 28 days of alprazolam treatment among patients with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) randomized 2:1 to drug or placebo in a double-blind design. Functional magnetic resonance imaging scans obtained during an emotion face matching task (EFMT) and an affective stimulus expectancy task (STIMEX) were performed at baseline, one hour after initial drug administration and 28 days later. Alprazolam significantly reduced scores on the Hamilton Anxiety Scale and the Penn State Worry Questionnaire after one week and 28 days of treatment. Brain activation in the amygdala during the EFMT and in the insula during the STIMEX was reduced one hour after alprazolam administration but returned to baseline levels at Day 28. Exploratory analyses revealed significant treatment differences in brain activity during the STIMEX on Day 28 in frontal lobe, caudate nucleus, middle temporal gyrus, secondary visual cortex, and supramarginal gyrus. These results are consistent with the notion that the neural mechanisms supporting sustained treatment effects of benzodiazepines in GAD differ from those underlying their acute effects.

Task positive and default mode networks during a working memory in children with primary monosymptomatic nocturnal enuresis and healthy controls.

Nocturnal enuresis is a common developmental disorder in children, and primary monosymptomatic nocturnal enuresis (PMNE) is the dominant subtype. This study investigated brain functional abnormalities that are specifically related to working memory in children with PMNE using function magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in combination with an n-back task. Twenty children with PMNE and 20 healthy children, group-matched for age and sex, participated in this experiment. Several brain regions exhibited reduced activation during the n-back task in children with PMNE, including the right precentral gyrus and the right inferior parietal lobule extending to the postcentral gyrus. Children with PMNE exhibited decreased cerebral activation in the task-positive network, increased task-related cerebral deactivation during a working memory task, and longer response times. Patients exhibited different brain response patterns to different levels of working memory and tended to compensate by greater default mode network deactivation to sustain normal working memory function. Our results suggest that children with PMNE have potential working memory dysfunction.

Lexical processing deficits in children with developmental language disorder: An event-related potentials study.

Lexical processing deficits in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have been postulated to arise as sequelae of their grammatical deficits (either directly or via compensatory mechanisms) and vice versa. We examined event-related potential indices of lexical processing in children with DLD (n = 23) and their typically developing peers (n = 16) using a picture-word matching paradigm. We found that children with DLD showed markedly reduced N400 amplitudes in response both to auditorily presented words that had initial phonological overlap with the name of the pictured object and to words that were not semantically or phonologically related to the pictured object. Moreover, this reduction was related to behavioral indices of phonological and lexical but not grammatical development. We also found that children with DLD showed a depressed phonological mapping negativity component in the early time window, suggesting deficits in phonological processing or early lexical access. The results are partially consistent with the overactivation account of lexical processing deficits in DLD and point to the relative functional independence of lexical/phonological and grammatical deficits in DLD, supporting a multidimensional view of the disorder. The results also, although indirectly, support the neuroplasticity account of DLD, according to which language impairment affects brain development and shapes the specific patterns of brain responses to language stimuli.

Taste Quality Decoding Parallels Taste Sensations

In most species, the sense of taste is key in the distinction of potentially nutritious and harmful food constituents and thereby in the acceptance (or rejection) of food. Taste quality is encoded by specialized receptors on the tongue, which detect chemicals corresponding to each of the basic tastes (sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and savory [1]), before taste quality information is transmitted via segregated neuronal fibers [2], distributed coding across neuronal fibers [3], or dynamic firing patterns [4] to the gustatory cortex in the insula. In rodents, both hardwired coding by labeled lines [2] and flexible, learning-dependent representations [5] and broadly tuned neurons [6] seem to coexist. It is currently unknown how, when, and where taste quality representations are established in the cortex and whether these representations are used for perceptual decisions. Here, we show that neuronal response patterns allow to decode which of four tastants (salty, sweet, sour, and bitter) participants tasted in a given trial by using time-resolved multivariate pattern analyses of large-scale electrophysiological brain responses. The onset of this prediction coincided with the earliest taste-evoked responses originating from the insula and opercular cortices, indicating that quality is among the first attributes of a taste represented in the central gustatory system. These response patterns correlated with perceptual decisions of taste quality: tastes that participants discriminated less accurately also evoked less discriminated brain response patterns. The results therefore provide the first evidence for a link between taste-related decision-making and the predictive value of these brain response patterns.

A Window into the Brain: Advances in Psychiatric fMRI.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) plays a key role in modern psychiatric research. It provides a means to assay differences in brain systems that underlie psychiatric illness, treatment response, and properties of brain structure and function that convey risk factor for mental diseases. Here we review recent advances in fMRI methods in general use and progress made in understanding the neural basis of mental illness. Drawing on concepts and findings from psychiatric fMRI, we propose that mental illness may not be associated with abnormalities in specific local regions but rather corresponds to variation in the overall organization of functional communication throughout the brain network. Future research may need to integrate neuroimaging information drawn from different analysis methods and delineate spatial and temporal patterns of brain responses that are specific to certain types of psychiatric disorders.