Reward‐related regions form a preferentially coupled system at rest

Abstract

Neuroimaging studies have implicated a set of striatal and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) regions that are commonly activated during reward processing tasks. Resting‐state functional connectivity (RSFC) studies have demonstrated that the human brain is organized into several functional systems that show strong temporal coherence in the absence of goal‐directed tasks. Here we use seed‐based and graph‐theory RSFC approaches to characterize the systems‐level organization of putative reward regions of at rest. Peaks of connectivity from seed‐based RSFC patterns for the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) were used to identify candidate reward regions which were merged with a previously used set of regions (Power et al., 2011). Graph‐theory was then used to determine system‐level membership for all regions. Several regions previously implicated in reward‐processing (NAcc, lateral and medial OFC, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex) comprised a distinct, preferentially coupled system. This RSFC system is stable across a range of connectivity thresholds and shares strong overlap with meta‐analyses of task‐based reward studies. This reward system shares between‐system connectivity with systems implicated in cognitive control and self‐regulation, including the fronto‐parietal, cingulo‐opercular, and default systems. Differences may exist in the pathways through which control systems interact with reward system components. Whereas NAcc is functionally connected to cingulo‐opercular and default systems, OFC regions show stronger connectivity with the fronto‐parietal system. We propose that future work may be able to interrogate group or individual differences in connectivity profiles using the regions delineated in this work to explore potential relationships to appetitive behaviors, self‐regulation failure, and addiction.

Pain modulates neural responses to reward in the medial prefrontal cortex

“…The mPFC has been recognized as one of the key brain regions comprising the reward neural circuitry (Dillon et al, ; Haber & Knutson, ; Huckins et al, ; Izuma et al, ). It plays an important role in encoding the probability and/or the value of a reward (Gläscher et al, ; Hu, ; Rushworth et al, ; Samejima & Doya, ).…”

“…Second, the modulated neural activities in the reward circuitry are found to be associated with reward‐related behaviors, such as the processing of rewarding music (Seminowicz et al, ) and the analgesic effect of placebo (Yu et al, ). In detail, brain areas in the reward neural circuitry are known to include the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) in the ventral striatum, the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), the orbital prefrontal cortex, and the anterior cingulate cortex (Dillon et al, ; Haber & Knutson, ; Huckins et al, ; Izuma, Saito, & Sadato, ). Studies with experimental acute pain found that, both the mPFC activity and its functional connectivity with NAcc were enhanced when subjective pain intensity was self‐regulated (Woo, Roy, Buhle, & Wager, ).…”

Peer Review #3 of "Recruitment of cognitive control regions during effortful self-control is associated with altered brain activity in control and reward systems in dieters during subsequent exposure to food commercials (v0.1)"

“…We selected eight nodes in the frontoparietal control network to remain consistent with our prior work showing that aggregate activity across these 8 nodes, versus activity in a larger set of frontoparietal nodes, was most predictive of dieters' self-control success and failure in daily life (Lopez et al, 2017). However, in order to investigate whether this effect generalizes across a larger set of nodes we used 31 frontoparietal nodes from a recently published parcellation study within our group based on a large, independent sample (N=828; Huckins et al, 2019) to re-compute regulation-reward balance scores. The findings presented in the main text largely replicated (for more details see Supplementary Materials for all results from this analysis).…”

Recruitment of cognitive control regions during effortful self-control is associated with altered brain activity in control and reward systems in dieters during subsequent exposure to food commercials

“…We selected eight nodes in the frontoparietal control network to remain consistent with our prior work showing that aggregate activity across these eight nodes, versus activity in a larger set of frontoparietal nodes, was most predictive of dieters’ self-control success and failure in daily life (Lopez et al, 2017). However, in order to investigate whether this effect generalizes across a larger set of nodes we used 31 frontoparietal nodes from a recently published parcellation study within our group based on a large, independent sample ( N = 828; Huckins et al, 2019) to re-compute regulation–reward balance scores. The findings presented in the main text largely replicated (for more details see Supplementary Materials for all results from this analysis).…”