Segregation of the human medial prefrontal cortex in social cognition

  • Bzdok D
  • Langner R
  • Schilbach L
  • et al.
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Abstract

While the human medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is widely believed to be a key node of neural networks relevant for socio-emotional processing, its functional subspecialization is still poorly understood. We thus revisited the often assumed differentiation of the mPFC in social cognition along its ventral-dorsal axis. Our neuroinformatic analysis was based on a neuroimaging meta-analysis of perspective-taking that yielded two separate clusters in the ventral and dorsal mPFC, respectively. We determined each seed region's brain-wide interaction pattern by two complementary measures of functional connectivity: co-activation across a wide range of neuroimaging studies archived in the BrainMap database and correlated signal fluctuations during unconstrained ("resting") cognition. Furthermore, we characterized the functions associated with these two regions using the BrainMap database. Across methods, the ventral mPFC was more strongly connected with the nucleus accumbens, hippocampus, posterior cingulate cortex, and retrosplenial cortex, while the dorsal mPFC was more strongly connected with the inferior frontal gyrus, temporo-parietal junction, and middle temporal gyrus. Further, the ventral mPFC was selectively associated with reward related tasks, while the dorsal mPFC was selectively associated with perspective-taking and episodic memory retrieval. The ventral mPFC is therefore predominantly involved in bottom-up-driven, approach/avoidance-modulating, and evaluation-related processing, whereas the dorsal mPFC is predominantly involved in top-down-driven, probabilistic-scene-informed, and metacognition-related processing in social cognition.

Figures

  • FIGURE 1 | Location of the seed regions. Seeds were drawn from an earlier coordinate-based neuroimaging meta-analysis on perspective-taking, which yielded two clusters of convergent brain activity in the ventral (beige) and dorsal (green) medial prefrontal cortex (Bzdok et al., 2012c). The centers of mass of the vmPFC and dmPFC seed are −4/52/−2 and −6/56/30, respectively. These two seeds represent a functional-structural segregation in the medial prefrontal cortex related to higher social-cognitive processing and provided the basis for the present quantitative analyses. The seeds were rendered into a T1-weighted MNI single subject template using mango (multi-image analysis GUI; http://ric.uthscsa.edu/mango/).
  • FIGURE 2 | Functional connectivity of the vmPFC and dmPFC seeds. Connectivity patterns of each seed as individually determined using meta-analytic connectivity modeling (MACM) and resting-state (RS) analyses. The color bars on the bottom represent Z -values. All results survived a cluster-corrected threshold of p < 0.05. Please refer
  • Table 2 | Functional connectivity of the dmPFC seed.
  • Table 2 | Continued
  • FIGURE 3 | Functional connectivity differences between the vmPFC and dmPFC seeds. Connectivity differences between the seeds individually determined using meta-analytic connectivity modeling (MACM) and resting-state (RS) analyses. The color bars on the bottom represent Z -values. All images were rendered using Caret. Coordinates in MNI
  • FIGURE 4 | Difference and conjunction analyses based on congruent functional connectivity of the vmPFC and dmPFC seeds. Depicts sagittal and coronal brain slices of areas consistently more strongly coupled (left and middle column) with either seed or congruently coupled with both seeds (right column) across meta-analytic connectivity modeling (MACM) and
  • Table 3 | Difference and conjunction analyses between functional connectivity of the vmPFC and dmPFC seeds.
  • FIGURE 5 | Functional profiling of the vmPFC and dmPFC seeds.

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APA

Bzdok, D., Langner, R., Schilbach, L., Engemann, D. A., Laird, A. R., Fox, P. T., & Eickhoff, S. B. (2013). Segregation of the human medial prefrontal cortex in social cognition. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00232

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