title: Cortical functional connectivity decodes subconscious, task-irrelevant threat-related emotion processing.
abstract: It is currently unclear to what extent cortical structures are required for and engaged during subconscious processing of biologically salient affective stimuli (i.e. the 'low-road' vs. 'many-roads' hypotheses). Here we show that cortical-cortical and cortical-subcortical functional connectivity (FC) contain substantially more information, relative to subcortical-subcortical FC (i.e. 'subcortical alarm' and other limbic regions), that predicts subliminal fearful face processing within individuals using training data from separate subjects. A plot of classification accuracy vs. number of selected whole-brain FC features revealed 92% accuracy when learning was based on the top 8 features from each training set. The most informative FC was between right amygdala and precuneus, which increased during subliminal fear conditions, while left and right amygdala FC decreased, suggesting a bilateral decoupling of this key limbic region during processing of subliminal fear-related stimuli. Other informative FC included angular gyrus, middle temporal gyrus and cerebellum. These findings identify FC that decodes subliminally perceived, task-irrelevant affective stimuli, and suggest that cortical structures are actively engaged by and appear to be essential for subliminal fear processing.
authors.affiliation: fMRI Research Center, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA. spiropan@gmail.com
authors.forename: Spiro P
authors.initials: SP
authors.lastname: Pantazatos
authors.forename: Ardesheer
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Talati
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Pavlidis
authors.forename: Joy
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hirsch
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001931:Brain Mapping; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005239:Fear / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D009434:Neural Pathways / Q000502:physiology*; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*