A rapid fMRI task battery for mapping of visual, motor, cognitive, and emotional function

Abstract

A set of sensory, motor, cognitive and emotional tasks were combined in a simple, rapid-presentation task battery and tested on a group of 31, normal, healthy subjects aged 22 to 76. Five tasks were selected on the basis of widespread use in fMRI and their ability to produce robust and reliable regional activations. They were: 1) a visual task designed to activate the occipital cortex; 2) a bimanual motor task designed to activate motor areas; 3) a verb generation task designed to activate speech processing areas; 4) an n-back task designed to activate areas associated with working memory and executive function; and 5) an emotional pictures task designed to provoke strong emotional responses that typically activate limbic structures. Most of the tasks produced reliable activations in individual subjects, and assessments of the distribution and reliability of individual subject activations in each targeted area are provided. The emotional pictures task did not demonstrate adequate sensitivity in a priori target regions, only in the a posteriori defined inferior temporal region. Age and gender specific differences were found in the activation patterns for both the cognitive and emotional tasks. The battery provides a prescribed means for researchers to obtain reliable functional localizers within 20-25 minutes of scanning, which can be used to support more elaborate mapping studies of brain function. The dataset can also serve as reliability metric for new fMRI labs and novice investigators seeking to test their acquisition and analysis techniques with minimal time investment and expense.

Prefrontal Cortical Changes Following Cognitive Training in Patients with Chronic Schizophrenia: Effects of Practice, Generalization, and Specificity

“…The bilateral frontopolar regions shown to have increased activity at post-test are involved with working memory tasks as well as tasks requiring executive control like the Wisconsin Card Sort (Buchsbaum et al, 2005), emotional processing (Drobyshevsky et al, 2006), episodic encoding (Hofer et al, 2003), attentional modulation (Peterson et al, 1999), and cognitive response conflict (Fan et al, 2003). These regions also show abnormal functionality in patients with schizophrenia during working memory tasks (Johnson et al, 2006).…”

Structural and functional neuroimaging in Klinefelter (47,XXY) syndrome: A review of the literature and preliminary results from a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of language

“…This fMRI study used a verb generation task known to activate most commonly areas of language comprehension and execution (Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas) in the language dominant hemisphere [Drobyshevsky et al, 2006; Plante et al, 2006]. The task required silent generation of an action verb related to a noun (i.e., an object name) presented on the screen (“Verb Generation Task” condition) contrasted with a control condition in which subjects were asked to look at non-letter symbols (“####”) shown at the center of the screen.…”

Gender Differences in Verbal and Visuospatial Working Memory Performance and Networks

“…While some authors did not find gender effects on WM task performance [19,20,21,22], others reported differences between the sexes [23,24]. The same is true for the corresponding brain activations which also were found to differ in some [19,20,21,23,25] but not all studies [22,26,27]. Besides the use of different WM paradigms (N-back, Sternberg item recognition tasks) and domains (spatial, verbal), again the fact of sometimes very small and inhomogeneous samples is likely to have contributed to these inconsistencies.…”