Beyond the Tripartite Cognition–Emotion–Interoception Model of the Human Insular Cortex

Abstract

Functional MRI studies report insular activations across a wide range of tasks involving affective, sensory, and motor processing, but also during tasks of high-level perception, attention, and control. While insular cortical activations are often reported in the literature, the diverse functional roles of this region are still not well understood. We used a meta-analytic approach to analyze the coactivation profiles of insular subdivisions -- dorsal anterior, ventral anterior, and posterior insula -- across fMRI studies in terms of multiple task domains including emotion, memory, attention, and reasoning. We found extensive coactivation of each insular subdivision, with substantial overlap between coactivation partners for each subdivision. Functional fingerprint analyses revealed that all subdivisions cooperated with a functionally diverse set of regions. Graph-theoretic analyses revealed that the dorsal anterior insula was a highly “central” structure in the coactivation network. Furthermore, analysis of the studies that activate the insular cortex itself showed that the right dorsal anterior insula was a particularly “diverse” structure in that it was likely to be active across multiple task domains. These results highlight the nuanced functional profiles of insular subdivisions and are consistent with recent work suggesting that the dorsal anterior insula can be considered a critical functional hub in the human brain.

Anticipatory Anxiety Disrupts Neural Valuation during Risky Choice

“…Our findings therefore suggest that during anxiety the same behavioral choices may have been brought about by goal-directed negative value computations in the insula (rather than positive value computations in the VMPC and VS), possibly in conjunction with compensatory mechanisms such as heuristics and increased habitual responding. In either case, we speculate that the reduction of value coding in the VMPFC and VS during anxiety may indicate a decrease in the positive value of the available choice options, even though such speculations need to be taken with caution given the problem of reverse inference in neuroimaging studies (Poldrack, 2011).…”

“…We tested our hypotheses about changes in neural valuation due to anticipatory anxiety in regions of interest (ROIs) previously shown to be involved in neural valuation and emotion processing. These regions comprised the VMPFC (Levy and Glimcher, 2011; Winecoff et al, 2013), VS (Tom et al, 2007;Bartra et al, 2013;Robinson et al, 2013a), insula (Robinson et al, 2013a), and amygdala (Jenison et al, 2011;Fossati, 2012). Bilateral masks for amygdala and insula were taken from the WFU PickAtlas (http://fmri.…”

Neural correlates of heart-focused interoception: a functional magnetic resonance imaging meta-analysis

“…However, recent findings indicate that the functional specificity of insular subdivisions clearly goes beyond the commonly accepted tripartite division into dorsal anterior, ventral anterior and posterior insula [42]. Another study has examined brain correlates of modality-specific physiological activation [43].…”

Heart evoked potential triggers brain responses to natural affective scenes: A preliminary study

“…Further, we hypothesized that such modulation would predominantly involve a fronto-insulo-temporal network (Couto et al, 2013a;Ibáñez and Manes, 2012) responsible for the processing of external and internal signals during cognitive-affective integration (Uddin et al, 2014). To address the above issues, here we relied on the heart-evoked potential (HEP), an event related potential (ERP) triggered by internal body signals, rather than external stimulus locked markers (Pollatos et al, 2007a).…”