Intracranial EEG Supports Multiple Subcortical-cortical Pathways in Emotion Processing
Abstract number :
3.374
Submission category :
5. Neuro Imaging / 5B. Functional Imaging
Year :
2024
Submission ID :
48
Source :
www.aesnet.org
Presentation date :
12/9/2024 12:00:00 AM
Published date :
Authors :
Presenting Author: Kaitlyn Davis, MA – University of Alabama at Birmingham
Adam Goodman, PhD – University of Alabama at Birmingham
Daniel Janko, BS – University of Alabama at Birmingham
John Magnotti, PhD – University of Pennsylvania
Rodolphe Nenert, PhD – University of Alabama at Birmingham
Jane B. Allendorfer, PhD – University of Alabama at Birmingham
Jerzy Szaflarski, MD, PhD – University of Alabama
Rationale: Processing emotional and social stimuli is critical to guiding behavior. Converging evidence from neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies suggests the thalamus, amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) contribute to this ability, but how these regions interact to process behaviorally-relevant information remains largely unknown. A major limit to clarifying the dynamics of this network is the lack of evidence from direct electrophysiological recordings in humans. Capitalizing on the spatio-temporal benefits of intracranial electroencephalography, we assessed the spectral dynamics and interactions between the thalamus, amygdala, medial OFC (mOFC) and lateral OFC (lOFC) during a facial emotion processing task.
Methods: 16 patients awaiting neurosurgery for treatment-resistant epilepsy were implanted with intracranial depth electrodes as part of their presurgical evaluation. After providing written informed consent, data were collected while they completed a facial emotion processing task, consisting of images of static faces with Happy, Sad, Fearful or Neutral expressions. Patients viewed 120 faces (30 per expression, 60 males) on a laptop, presented for 2s each, and identified the biological sex of each face using the keyboard. Incorrect trials were excluded.Data were sampled at 2048Hz and preprocessed using R Analysis and Visualization of iEEG. Data were notch filtered and sectioned into 2s epochs using the onset of each trial. Electrode contacts were visually inspected and removed if they contained non-physiological artifacts. Contacts were localized by coregistering postoperative CT scans to preoperative T1 MRI scans. Contacts were then identified in MNI space and labeled with the Harvard-Oxford and Desikan-Killiany atlases using iElectrodes in MATLAB. There were 4 patients with 15 thalamus contacts, 12 with 52 amygdala contacts, 16 with 138 mOFC contacts, and 15 with 95 lOFC contacts.For each patient, spectral Granger causality was calculated for each available region pair in both directions over the 2s stimulus window, using the multivariate GC toolbox in MATLAB. Estimates were considered significant if they exceeded the 95% confidence interval established by permutation testing. Results were averaged across patients with amygdala-OFC connections. In contrast, thalamic connectivity was assessed at the single subject level, considering the small sample size.
Results: Findings revealed that viewing static facial expressions in patients with TRE evoked bidirectional coupling between the amygdala-mOFC and mOFC-lOFC (ps< 0.001). For the subset of patients with thalamic contacts, results demonstrated bidirectional interactions between the thalamus and OFC as well as between the thalamus and amygdala (ps< 0.001). Connectivity between these subcortical structures and the rest of the network was associated with low frequencies (3-12Hz) while communication within the OFC encompassed a broader range (3-45Hz).
Conclusions: These findings demonstrate distributed, bidirectional connectivity between subcortical and cortical regions during facial emotion processing.
Funding: National Science Foundation EPSCoR: 1632891 and NINDS T32 in Neurobiology of Cognition and Cognitive Disorders: NS061788
Neuro Imaging