Motor control is integral to all types of human behavior, and the dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex (dACC) is thought to play an important role in the brain network underlying motor control. Yet the role of the dACC in motor control is under-characterized. Here we aimed to characterize the dACC’s role in adolescent brain network interactions during a simple motor control task involving visually coordinated unimanual finger movements. Network interactions were assessed using both undirected and directed functional connectivity analysis of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Blood-Oxygen-Level-Dependent (BOLD) signals, comparing the task with a rest condition. The relation between the dACC and Supplementary Motor Area (SMA) was compared to that between the dACC and Primary Motor Cortex (M1). The directed signal from dACC to SMA was significantly elevated during motor control in the task. By contrast, the directed signal from SMA to dACC, both directed signals between dACC and M1, and the undirected functional connections of dACC with SMA and M1, all did not differ between task and rest. Undirected coupling of dACC with both SMA and dACC, and only the dACC-to-SMA directed signal, were significantly greater for a proactive than a reactive task condition, suggesting that dACC plays a role in motor control by maintaining stimulus timing expectancy. Overall, these results suggest that the dACC selectively modulates the SMA during visually coordinated unimanual behavior in adolescence. The role of the dACC as an important brain area for the mediation of task-related motor control may be in place in adolescence, continuing into adulthood. The task and analytic approach described here should be extended to the study of healthy adults to examine network profiles of the dACC during basic motor behavior.

fMRI has provided vibrant characterization of regional and network responses associated with associative learning and memory; however, their relationship to functional neurochemistry is unclear. Here, we introduce a novel application of in vivo proton functional magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H fMRS) to investigate the dynamics of hippocampal glutamate during paired-associated learning and memory in healthy young adults. We show that the temporal dynamics of glutamate differed significantly during processes of memory consolidation and retrieval. Moreover, learning proficiency was predictive of the temporal dynamics of glutamate such that fast learners were characterized by a significant increase in glutamate levels early in learning, whereas this increase was only observed later in slow learners. The observed functional dynamics of glutamate provides a novel in vivo marker of brain function. Previously demonstrated N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor mediated synaptic plasticity during associative memory formation may be expressed in glutamate dynamics, which the novel application of 1H MRS is sensitive to. The novel application of 1H fMRS can provide highly innovative vistas for characterizing brain function in vivo, with significant implications for studying glutamatergic neurotransmission in health and disorders such as schizophrenia.

Brain network dysfunction is emerging as a central biomarker of interest in psychiatry, in large part, because psychiatric conditions are increasingly seen as disconnection syndromes. Understanding dysfunctional brain network profiles in task-active states provides important information on network engagement in an experimental context. This in turn may be predictive of many of the cognitive and behavioral deficits associated with complex behavioral phenotypes. Here we investigated brain network profiles in youth with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), contrasting them with a group of age-comparable controls. Network interactions were assessed during simple working memory: in particular, we focused on the modulation by the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) of cortical, striatal, and thalamic regions. The focus on the dACC was motivated by its hypothesized role in the pathophysiology of OCD. However, its task-active network signatures have not been investigated before. Network interactions were modeled using psychophysiological interaction, a simple directional model of seed to target brain interactions. Our results indicate that OCD is characterized by significantly increased dACC modulation of cortical, striatal, and thalamic targets during working memory, and that this aberrant increase in OCD patients is maintained regardless of working memory demand. The results constitute compelling evidence of dysfunctional brain network interactions in OCD and suggest that these interactions may be related to a combination of network inefficiencies and dACC hyper-activity that has been associated with the phenotype.

The dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex (dACC) and the Supplementary Motor Area (SMA) are known to interact during motor coordination behavior. We previously discovered that the directional influences underlying this interaction in a visuo-motor coordination task are asymmetric, with the dACC→SMA influence being significantly greater than that in the reverse direction. To assess the specificity of this effect, here we undertook an analysis of the interaction between dACC and SMA in two distinct contexts. In addition to the motor coordination task, we also assessed these effects during a (n-back) working memory task. We applied directed functional connectivity analysis to these two task paradigms, and also to the rest condition of each paradigm, in which rest blocks were interspersed with task blocks. We report here that the previously known asymmetric interaction between dACC and SMA, with dACC→SMA dominating, was significantly larger in the motor coordination task than the memory task. Moreover the asymmetry between dACC and SMA was reversed during the rest condition of the motor coordination task, but not of the working memory task. In sum, the dACC→SMA influence was significantly greater in the motor task than the memory task condition, and the SMA→dACC influence was significantly greater in the motor rest than the memory rest condition. We interpret these results as suggesting that the potentiation of motor sub-networks during the motor rest condition supports the motor control of SMA by dACC during the active motor task condition.

In an effort to elucidate differences in functioning brain networks between youth with obsessive-compulsive disorder and controls, we used fMRI signals to analyze brain network interactions of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) during visually coordinated motor responses. Subjects made a uni-manual response to briefly presented probes, at periodic (allowing participants to maintain a “motor set”) or random intervals (demanding reactive responses). Network interactions were assessed using psycho-physiological interaction (PPI), a basic model of functional connectivity evaluating modulatory effects of the dACC in the context of each task condition. Across conditions, OCD were characterized by hyper-modulation by the dACC, with loci alternatively observed as both condition-general and condition-specific. Thus, dynamically driven task demands during simple uni-manual motor control induce compensatory network interactions in cortical-thalamic regions in OCD. These findings support previous research in OCD showing compensatory network interactions during complex memory tasks, but establish that these network effects are observed during basic sensorimotor processing. Thus, these patterns of network dysfunction may in fact be independent of the complexity of tasks used to induce brain network activity. Hypothesis-driven approaches coupled with sophisticated network analyses are a highly valuable approach in using fMRI to uncover mechanisms in disorders like OCD.