The colour centre in the cerebral cortex of man

Anatomical and physiological studies have shown that there is an area specialized for the processing of colour (area V4) in the prestriate cortex of macaque monkey brain. Earlier this century, suggestive clinical evidence for a colour centre in the brain of man was dismissed because of the association of other visual defects with the defects in colour vision. However, since the demonstration of functional specialization in the macaque cortex, the question of a colour centre in man has been reinvestigated, based on patients with similar lesions in the visual cortex. In order to study the colour centre in normal human subjects, we used the technique of positron emission tomography (PET), which measures increases in blood flow resulting from increased activity in the cerebral cortex. A comparison of the results of PET scans of subjects viewing multi-coloured and black-and-white displays has identified a region of normal human cerebral cortex specialized for colour vision.     

Conflict monitoring versus selection-for-action in anterior cingulate cortex

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), on the medial surface of the frontal lobes of the brain, is widely believed to be involved in the regulation of attention. Beyond this, however, its specific contribution to cognition remains uncertain. One influential theory has interpreted activation within the ACC as reflecting 'selection-for-action', a set of processes that guide the selection of environmental objects as triggers of or targets for action. We have proposed an alternative hypothesis, in which the ACC serves not to exert top-down attentional control but instead to detect and signal the occurrence of conflicts in information processing. Here, to test this theory against the selection-for-action theory, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activation during performance of a task where, for a particular subset of trials, the strength of selection-for-action is inversely related to the degree of response conflict. Activity within the ACC was greater during trials featuring high levels of conflict (and weak selection-for-action) than during trials with low levels of conflict (and strong selection-for-action), providing evidence in favour of the conflict-monitoring account of ACC function.     

大鼠扣带回——丘脑腹侧基底核投射的HRP研究

用ＨＲＰ逆行示踪法证实了大鼠扣带回前部－－丘脑腹侧基底核投射通路。当ＨＲＰ注入丘脑腹侧基底核时,在同侧扣带回前部观察到标记的细胞,标记细胞密度背侧区比腹侧区高。上述结果表明扣带回前部神经元直接投射到同侧丘脑腹侧基底核,且背侧区的投射密度较大。     

Functional localization and lateralization of human olfactory cortex.

Anatomical and physiological investigations in monkeys indicate that olfaction is subserved by several cortical regions. But the areas implicated in the human olfactory system have not been definitively identified by functional criteria. Behavioural evidence has suggested that laterally specialized mechanisms for odour processing may exist, but the neuroanatomical substrate remains unknown. We used positron emission tomography to study the cortical representation of human olfactory processing by comparing cerebral blood flow changes evoked during olfactory stimulation with those of a control task. We report here significant cerebral blood flow increases at the junction of the inferior frontal and temporal lobes bilaterally, corresponding to the piriform cortex, and unilaterally, in the right orbitofrontal cortex. The results complement and extend previous data implicating these regions in olfactory processing, and indicate that a functional asymmetry exists in the human brain favouring the right orbitofrontal area in olfaction.     

Mapping human visual cortex with positron emission tomography

Positron-emission tomography (PET) can localize functions of the human brain by imaging regional cerebral blood flow (CBF) during voluntary behaviour. Functional brain mapping with PET, however, has been hindered by PET's poor spatial resolution (typically greater than 1 cm). We have developed an image-analysis strategy that can map functional zones not resolved by conventional PET images. Brain areas selectively activated by a behavioural task can be isolated by subtracting a paired control-state image from the task-state image, thereby removing areas not recruited by the task. When imaged in isolation the centre of an activated area can be located very precisely. This allows subtle shifts in response locale due to changes in task to be detected readily despite poor spatial resolution. As an initial application of this strategy we mapped the retinal projection topography of human primary visual cortex. Functional zones separated by less than 3 mm (centre-to-centre) were differentiated using PET CBF images with a spatial resolution of 18 mm. This technique is not limited to a particular brain area or type of behaviour but does require that the increase in CBF produced by the task be both intense and focal.     

大脑前额叶扣带回皮层调制丘脑触觉信息的途径研究

大脑前额叶扣带回皮层是一个与感觉功能密切相关的脑区,它能够对丘脑触觉反应进行调制.实验在10只戊巴比妥钠（1%）麻醉的SD雄性大鼠上进行,采用辣根过氧化物酶（horseradish peroxidase,HRP）逆行标记的方法,对扣带皮层前部调制丘脑腹侧基底核（ventrobasal,VB）感觉信息的途径进行了研究.实验结果显示,VB核可以接受扣带皮层后部的投射,而且扣带皮层前部有纤维投射到扣带皮层后部.由此提示了前扣带皮层对丘脑腹侧基底核神经元触觉信息调制的可能神经环路是：扣带皮层前部-扣带皮层后部-丘脑腹侧基底核.     

基于张量子空间的半脑对称度特征与癫痫识别

结合脑PET图像信息,提出了一种基于张量子空间的半脑对称度特征的识别方法用于识别PET图像中癫痫病灶.首先计算全部脑PET图像中所有体素的SUV,并基于SUV建立三阶张量;然后提取半脑对称度特征,建立半脑对称度张量模型;其次利用多线性主成分分析(MPCA)方法对半脑对称度张量模型进行特征选择;最后基于支持向量机(SVM)分类器进行癫痫识别.实验结果表明:提出的算法能够有效地识别脑PET图像中的癫痫病灶,可以作为计算机辅助诊断方式帮助医生进行癫痫疾病的诊断.     

Deactivations during the numerical processing

Deactivation has been encountered frequently in functional brain imaging researches. However, the deactivations during the numerical processing have not been reported yet. In this study, the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was employed to investigate the pattern of the deactivation in the brain of 15 healthy subjects during the numerical addition task. Analyses revealed significant deactivations in several brain regions, including the posterior cingulate, precuneus, anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortex. Especially, we found notable deactivation in bilateral insula. Accounting for the cognitive functions of these regions participating in a combinated way, we discuss their contributions in sustaining the brain activity during conscious resting state, and indicate that the insula is an important area of gathering auditory information from the external world.     

A functional role for vasoactive intestinal polypeptide in anterior cingulate cortex

Vasoactive intestinal polypeptide (VIP) is present in high concentrations in the cerebral cortex, where it is the putative neurotransmitter of a major intracortical neuronal system. Homogenates of cortical tissue contain high-affinity, specific binding sites for VIP as well as an adenylate cyclase system which is sensitive to this peptide. As with many of the other peptidergic systems which have been identified in the central nervous system (CNS), it has proved extremely difficult to elucidate the nature and extent of the functional role of VIP in specific brain areas. Here, using the quantitative autoradiographic 14C-deoxyglucose technique in rats to provide insight into functional processes, we describe the increases in glucose utilization which occur locally in anterior cingulate cortex following the unilateral injection of VIP (20 pmol) into this key brain area and, additionally, the focal alterations in glucose use in CNS regions having known neuronal connections with the injected region (for example, ipsilateral mediodorsal thalamus, ventral tegmental area, nucleus accumbens, caudate nucleus and contralateral cingulate cortex). These data provide evidence that VIP may modify the processing of afferent and efferent information within the anterior cingulate cortex in the conscious rat.     

Lesions of the human amygdala impair enhanced perception of emotionally salient events

Commensurate with the importance of rapidly and efficiently evaluating motivationally significant stimuli, humans are probably endowed with distinct faculties and maintain specialized neural structures to enhance their detection. Here we consider that a critical function of the human amygdala is to enhance the perception of stimuli that have emotional significance. Under conditions of limited attention for normal perceptual awareness-that is, the attentional blink-we show that healthy observers demonstrate robust benefits for the perception of verbal stimuli of aversive content compared with stimuli of neutral content. In contrast, a patient with bilateral amygdala damage has no enhanced perception for such aversive stimulus events. Examination of patients with either left or right amygdala resections shows that the enhanced perception of aversive words depends specifically on the left amygdala. All patients comprehend normally the affective meaning of the stimulus events, despite the lack of evidence for enhanced perceptual encoding of these events in patients with left amygdala lesions. Our results reveal a neural substrate for affective influences on perception, indicating that similar neural mechanisms may underlie the affective modulation of both recollective and perceptual experience.     

Feature-based attention influences motion processing gain in macaque visual cortex.

Changes in neural responses based on spatial attention have been demonstrated in many areas of visual cortex, indicating that the neural correlate of attention is an enhanced response to stimuli at an attended location and reduced responses to stimuli elsewhere. Here we demonstrate non-spatial, feature-based attentional modulation of visual motion processing, and show that attention increases the gain of direction-selective neurons in visual cortical area MT without narrowing the direction-tuning curves. These findings place important constraints on the neural mechanisms of attention and we propose to unify the effects of spatial location, direction of motion and other features of the attended stimuli in a 'feature similarity gain model' of attention.     

The task dependent interaction of the deactivation regions

Although deactivation has been found frequently in former functional brain imaging researches, only recently has it become a focus of systematic study because of its not well understood physiological mechanism. However, most of the researches concentrated on the brain areas that would present deactivation, and, to our knowledge, the deactivation connectivity between these brain areas during the cognitive tasks has rarely been reported in literature. In this work, using the functional connectivity method WlCA （within-condition interregional covariance analysis）, we analyzed the deactivations in two different cognitive tasks symbol orientation and number comparison. The results revealed deactivations in the posterior cingulate, precuneus, anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortex in both tasks. However, the interaction between the deactivated regions shows many differences. Our result further indicates that the potential implication of special deactivation connectivity may be related to the different task or attention resource. Further research is needed to clarify the exact reason.     

Optical imaging of epileptiform and functional activity in human cerebral cortex.

Optical imaging of animal somatosensory, olfactory and visual cortices has revealed maps of functional activity. In non-human primates, high-resolution maps of the visual cortex have been obtained using only an intrinsic reflection signal. Although the time course of the signal is slower than membrane potential changes, the maximum optical changes correspond to the maximal neuronal activity. The intrinsic optical signal may represent the flow of ionic currents, oxygen delivery, changes in blood volume, potassium accumulation or glial swelling. Here we use similar techniques to obtain maps from human cortex during stimulation-evoked epileptiform afterdischarges and cognitively evoked functional activity. Optical changes increased in magnitude as the intensity and duration of the afterdischarges increased. In areas surrounding the afterdischarge activity, optical changes were in the opposite direction and possibly represent an inhibitory surround. Large optical changes were found in the sensory cortex during tongue movement and in Broca's and Wernicke's language areas during naming exercises. The adaptation of high-resolution optical imaging for use on human cortex provides a new technique for investigation of the organization of the sensory and motor cortices, language, and other cognitive processes.     

Identification of Zhoukoudian <Emphasis Type="Italic">Homo erectus</Emphasis> brain asymmetry using 3D laser scanning

Endocasts are important materials used for the study of human brain evolution, and allow examination of the external features of brain anatomy from the inside the cranium. Studies examining brain asymmetries in fossil hominids are usually limited to scoring of differences in hemisphere protrusion rostrally and caudally, or to comparing the width of the hemispheres. In the present study, using 3D laser scanning, we examined asymmetries of the hemisphere volumes and surface areas in the Zhoukoudain (ZKD) Homo erectus, dated to 0.4–0.8 Ma. Compared with modern endocasts, we found that the absolute hemisphere volumes and surface areas exhibited no significant asymmetries in the ZKD or in modern specimens. However, the relative hemisphere volumes against surface areas differed between the two groups. When comparing the relative sizes between the left and right hemispheres, the ZKD specimens exhibited a greater variation than in the modern humans; there were no differences in the two hemispheres in the ZKD specimens, while in the modern endocasts the left hemisphere was significantly greater than the right hemisphere. These data suggest that brain asymmetries originated from relative brain sizes rather than absolute brain volumes during human evolution. These anatomical changes are likely related to the origin of human brain lateralization.     

Functional brain laterality for sequential movements： Impact of transient practice

The impact of learning on brain functional laterality has not been systematically investigated. We employed an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging combined with a delayed sequential movement task to investigate brain activation pattern and laterality during a transient practice in 12 subjects. Both hemispheres, involving motor areas and posterior parietal cortex, were engaged during motor preparation and execution, with larger activation volume in the left hemisphere than in the right. Activation volume in these regions significantly decreased after a transient practice, with more reduction in the right hemisphere resulting increase in left lateralization. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the physiological significance of brain functional laterality.     

Sensory experience modifies the short-term dynamics of neocortical synapses.

Many representations of sensory stimuli in the neocortex are arranged as topographic maps. These cortical maps are not fixed, but show experience-dependent plasticity. For instance, sensory deprivation causes the cortical area representing the deprived sensory input to shrink, and neighbouring spared representations to enlarge, in somatosensory, auditory or visual cortex. In adolescent and adult animals, changes in cortical maps are most noticeable in the supragranular layers at the junction of deprived and spared cortex. However, the cellular mechanisms of this experience-dependent plasticity are unclear. Long-term potentiation and depression have been implicated, but have not been proven to be necessary or sufficient for cortical map reorganization. Short-term synaptic dynamics have not been considered. We developed a brain slice preparation involving rat whisker barrel cortex in vitro. Here we report that sensory deprivation alters short-term synaptic dynamics in both vertical and horizontal excitatory pathways within the supragranular cortex. Moreover, modifications of horizontal pathways amplify changes in the vertical inputs. Our findings help to explain the functional cortical reorganization that follows persistent changes of sensory experience.     

Neural mechanisms mediating optimism bias

Humans expect positive events in the future even when there is no evidence to support such expectations. For example, people expect to live longer and be healthier than average, they underestimate their likelihood of getting a divorce, and overestimate their prospects for success on the job market. We examined how the brain generates this pervasive optimism bias. Here we report that this tendency was related specifically to enhanced activation in the amygdala and in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex when imagining positive future events relative to negative ones, suggesting a key role for areas involved in monitoring emotional salience in mediating the optimism bias. These are the same regions that show irregularities in depression, which has been related to pessimism. Across individuals, activity in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex was correlated with trait optimism. The current study highlights how the brain may generate the tendency to engage in the projection of positive future events, suggesting that the effective integration and regulation of emotional and autobiographical information supports the projection of positive future events in healthy individuals, and is related to optimism.     

Guarding the gateway to cortex with attention in visual thalamus

The massive visual input from the eye to the brain requires selective processing of some visual information at the expense of other information, a process referred to as visual attention. Increases in the responses of visual neurons with attention have been extensively studied along the visual processing streams in monkey cerebral cortex, from primary visual areas to parietal and frontal cortex. Here we show, by recording neurons in attending macaque monkeys (Macaca mulatta), that attention modulates visual signals before they even reach cortex by increasing responses of both magnocellular and parvocellular neurons in the first relay between retina and cortex, the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN). At the same time, attention decreases neuronal responses in the adjacent thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN). Crick argued for such modulation of the LGN by observing that it is inhibited by the TRN, and suggested that "if the thalamus is the gateway to the cortex, the reticular complex might be described as the guardian of the gateway", a reciprocal relationship we now show to be more than just hypothesis. The reciprocal modulation in LGN and TRN appears only during the initial visual response, but the modulation of LGN reappears later in the response, suggesting separate early and late sources of attentional modulation in LGN.     

Neuronal correlates of parametric working memory in the prefrontal cortex.

Humans and monkeys have similar abilities to discriminate the difference in frequency between two mechanical vibrations applied sequentially to the fingertips. A key component of this sensory task is that the second stimulus is compared with the trace left by the first (base) stimulus, which must involve working memory. Where and how is this trace held in the brain? This question was investigated by recording from single neurons in the prefrontal cortex of monkeys while they performed the somatosensory discrimination task. Here we describe neurons in the inferior convexity of the prefrontal cortex whose discharge rates varied, during the delay period between the two stimuli, as a monotonic function of the base stimulus frequency. We describe this as 'monotonic stimulus encoding', and we suggest that the result may generalize: monotonic stimulus encoding may be the basic representation of one-dimensional sensory stimulus quantities in working memory. Thus we predict that other behavioural tasks that require ordinal comparisons between scalar analogue stimuli would give rise to monotonic responses similar to those reported here.     

利手与注意偏向对双耳分听汉字大脑功能优势的影响

对24名左利手和24名右利手被试在三种注意条件（刺激驱动、注意左耳和注意右耳）下进行双耳分听汉字测验,检查中国人利手与汉字听觉词汇加工大脑两半球功能优势的关系,同时考察被试的注意偏向对优势效应的影响.结果表明：（1）汉语母语左利手被试加工汉字听觉词汇的大脑功能偏侧化组织明显不同于右利手;（2）右利手被试在刺激驱动条件下的右耳（左半球）优势易受注意偏向的调节出现明显波动;（3）注意偏向对左利手被试的影响主要表现为优势的左耳（右半球）成绩的下降与非优势的右耳（左半球）成绩的提高,这暗示汉语母语左利手者可能存在汉字听觉词汇加工的潜在两半球表征.