Department of Psychology, Faculty of Health Sciences, Camilo José Cela University, Madrid, Spain.
Laboratory of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience, Center for Biomedical Technology, Technical University of Madrid and Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain.
Psychophysiology. 2017 Nov;54(11):1726-1740. doi: 10.1111/psyp.12912. Epub 2017 Jun 25.
The active maintenance of information in visual working memory (WM) is known to rely on the sustained activity over functional networks including frontal, parietal, occipital, and temporal cortices. Previous studies have described interference-based disturbances in the functional coupling between prefrontal and posterior cortices, and that such disturbances can be restored for a successful WM performance after the presentation of the interfering stimulus. However, very few studies have applied functional connectivity measures to the analysis of the brain dynamics involved in overriding emotional distraction, and all of them have limited their analysis to the particular connections between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex. In this study, we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to characterize the mutual information-based functional connectivity dynamics among regions of interest located over the prefrontal, the parietal, the temporal, and the occipital cortex. Our results show that the detection of emotional distraction at early latencies (50-150 ms) induces a reduction of functional connectivity involving parietal and temporal cortices that are part of the frontoposterior WM network, while functional coupling among prefrontal areas and between them and posterior cortices is strengthened during the detection of emotional distractors. Later in the processing of the distractor (250-350 and 360-460 ms), the frontoposterior coupling is reestablished for a successful performance, while the orbitofrontal and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex become strongly connected to posterior cortices as a mechanism to cope with emotional distractors.
视觉工作记忆（WM）中的信息主动维持被认为依赖于包括额、顶、枕和颞叶皮质在内的功能网络的持续活动。先前的研究描述了前额叶和后皮质之间功能耦合的基于干扰的干扰，并且在呈现干扰刺激后，这种干扰可以恢复成功的 WM 表现。然而，很少有研究将功能连接测量应用于分析涉及克服情绪干扰的大脑动力学，而且所有研究都将其分析仅限于杏仁核和前额叶皮质之间的特定连接。在这项研究中，我们使用脑磁图（MEG）来描述位于前额叶、顶叶、颞叶和枕叶上的感兴趣区域之间基于互信息的功能连接动力学。我们的结果表明，在早期潜伏期（50-150 毫秒）检测到情绪干扰会导致涉及顶叶和颞叶的功能连接减少，这些区域是额后 WM 网络的一部分，而前额叶区域之间以及它们与后皮质之间的功能耦合在检测情绪干扰物时会增强。在干扰物的处理后期（250-350 毫秒和 360-460 毫秒），为了成功的表现，额后耦合得以重建，而眶额和腹外侧前额叶皮质与后皮质之间的连接变得非常紧密，作为应对情绪干扰的一种机制。
