Heller Aaron S, Cohen Alexandra O, Dreyfuss Michael F W, Casey B J
Department of Psychiatry, Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology, Weill Cornell Medical College, 1300 York Avenue, P.O. Box 140, New York, NY 10065, USA
Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry, University of Miami, P.O. Box 248185, Coral Gables, FL 33124-0751, USA.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2016 Dec;11(12):1910-1918. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsw097. Epub 2016 Jul 21.
The capacity to suppress inappropriate thoughts, emotions and actions in favor of appropriate ones shows marked changes throughout childhood and adolescence. Most research has focused on pre-frontal circuit development to explain these changes. Yet, subcortical circuitry involving the amygdala and ventral striatum (VS) has been shown to modulate cue-triggered motivated behaviors in rodents. The nature of the interaction between these two subcortical regions in humans is less well understood, especially during development when there appears to be heightened sensitivity to emotional cues. In the current study, we tested how task-based cortico-subcortical and subcortico-subcortical functional connectivity in 155 participants ages from 5 to 32 impacted cognitive control performance on an emotional go/nogo task. Functional connectivity between the amygdala and VS was inversely correlated with age and predicted cognitive control to emotional cues, when controlling for performance to neutral cues. In contrast, increased medial pre-frontal-amygdala connectivity was associated with better cognitive control to emotional cues and this cortical-subcortical connectivity mediated the association between amygdala-VS connectivity and emotional cognitive control. These findings suggest a dissociation in how subcortical-subcortical and cortical-subcortical connectivity impact cognitive control across development.
抑制不适当的思想、情绪和行为以支持适当的思想、情绪和行为的能力在整个童年和青少年时期有显著变化。大多数研究都集中在前额叶回路的发育上，以解释这些变化。然而，涉及杏仁核和腹侧纹状体（VS）的皮质下回路已被证明可调节啮齿动物中线索触发的动机行为。在人类中，这两个皮质下区域之间相互作用的性质尚不太清楚，尤其是在发育过程中，此时对情绪线索的敏感性似乎会增强。在本研究中，我们测试了155名年龄在5至32岁之间的参与者基于任务的皮质-皮质下和皮质下-皮质下功能连接如何影响情绪go/nogo任务中的认知控制表现。在控制对中性线索的表现时，杏仁核与VS之间的功能连接与年龄呈负相关，并预测了对情绪线索的认知控制。相比之下，内侧前额叶-杏仁核连接性的增加与对情绪线索的更好认知控制相关，并且这种皮质-皮质下连接介导了杏仁核-VS连接与情绪认知控制之间的关联。这些发现表明，在整个发育过程中，皮质下-皮质下和皮质-皮质下连接对认知控制的影响存在差异。
