Cortical functional connectivity decodes subconscious, task-irrelevant threat-related emotion processing

• Published in: NeuroImage (Orlando, Fla.) Vol. 61; no. 4; pp. 1355 - 1363
• Main Authors: Pantazatos, Spiro P., Talati, Ardesheer, Pavlidis, Paul, Hirsch, Joy
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Elsevier Inc 16.07.2012; Elsevier Limited
• Subjects: Adult; Amygdala; Anxiety; Brain; Brain Mapping; Brain-reading; Cerebral Cortex - physiology; Emotion processing; Emotions; Emotions - physiology; Facial Expression; Fear - physiology; Female; Functional networks; Humans; Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Male; Medical research; Neural Pathways - physiology; Recognition (Psychology) - physiology; Studies; Subconscious threat detection; Brain-reading; Subconscious threat detection; Emotion processing; Functional networks
• ISSN: 1053-8119; 1095-9572; 1095-9572
• DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.03.051

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.