Topographic analysis of individual activation patterns in medial frontal cortex in schizophrenia
UMass Chan Affiliations
Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases and ImmunologyDocument Type
Journal ArticlePublication Date
2009-07-27Keywords
AdultBrain Mapping
Cluster Analysis
Cognition
Frontal Lobe
Humans
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Neuropsychological Tests
Psychomotor Performance
Reaction Time
Schizophrenia
Task Performance and Analysis
Immunology and Infectious Disease
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Individual variability in the location of neural activations poses a unique problem for neuroimaging studies employing group averaging techniques to investigate the neural bases of cognitive and emotional functions. This may be especially challenging for studies examining patient groups, which often have limited sample sizes and increased intersubject variability. In particular, medial frontal cortex (MFC) dysfunction is thought to underlie performance monitoring dysfunction among patients with schizophrenia, yet previous studies using group averaging to compare schizophrenic patients to controls have yielded conflicting results. To examine individual activations in MFC associated with two aspects of performance monitoring, interference and error processing, functional magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired while 17 patients with schizophrenia and 21 healthy controls (HCs) performed an event-related version of the multisource interference task. Comparisons of averaged data revealed few differences between the groups. By contrast, topographic analysis of individual activations for errors showed that control subjects exhibited activations spanning across both posterior and anterior regions of MFC while patients primarily activated posterior MFC, possibly reflecting an impaired emotional response to errors in schizophrenia. This discrepancy between topographic and group-averaged results may be due to the significant dispersion among individual activations, particularly in HCs, highlighting the importance of considering intersubject variability when interpreting the medial frontal response to error commission.Source
Hum Brain Mapp. 2009 Jul;30(7):2146-56. Link to article on publisher's siteDOI
10.1002/hbm.20657Permanent Link to this Item
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14038/35225PubMed ID
18819107Related Resources
Link to Article in PubMedae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1002/hbm.20657