Department of Psychology, University of Georgia, 125 Baldwin Street, Athens, GA 30602, United States.
Department of Psychology, University of Georgia, 125 Baldwin Street, Athens, GA 30602, United States; Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, Brown University, Box G-A1, Providence, RI 02912, United States.
Neuroimage. 2018 Jul 1;174:463-471. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.03.022. Epub 2018 Mar 15.
Working memory (WM), the short-term abstraction and manipulation of information, is an essential neurocognitive process in daily functioning. Few studies have concurrently examined the functional and structural neural correlates of WM and the current study did so to characterize both overlapping and unique associations. Participants were a large sample of adults from the Human Connectome Project (N = 1064; 54% female) who completed an in-scanner visual N-back WM task. The results indicate a clear dissociation between BOLD activation during the WM task and brain structure in relation to performance. In particular, while activation in the middle frontal gyrus was positively associated with WM performance, cortical thickness in this region was inversely associated with performance. Additional unique associations with WM were BOLD activation in superior parietal lobule, cingulate, and fusiform gyrus and gray matter volume in the orbitofrontal cortex and cuneus. Across findings, substantially larger effects were observed for functional associations relative to structural associations. These results provide further evidence implicating frontoparietal subunits of the brain in WM. Moreover, these findings reveal the distinct, and in some cases opposing, roles of brain structure and neural activation in WM, highlighting the lack of homology between structure and function in relation to cognition.
工作记忆(WM)是信息的短期抽象和操作,是日常功能的重要神经认知过程。很少有研究同时检查 WM 的功能和结构神经相关性,而本研究就是为了描述两者的重叠和独特关联。参与者是来自人类连接组计划(HCP)的大量成年人样本(N=1064;女性占 54%),他们在扫描过程中完成了视觉 N 回 WM 任务。结果表明,在 WM 任务期间的大脑活动与大脑结构和表现之间存在明显的分离。具体来说,虽然额中回的激活与 WM 表现呈正相关,但该区域的皮质厚度与表现呈负相关。与 WM 相关的其他独特关联包括顶叶上回、扣带回和梭状回的 BOLD 激活,以及眶额皮质和楔前叶的灰质体积。总的来说,相对于结构关联,功能关联的影响要大得多。这些结果进一步表明,大脑的额顶叶亚单位与 WM 有关。此外,这些发现揭示了大脑结构和神经激活在 WM 中的不同作用,在某些情况下甚至是相反的作用,突出了认知方面结构和功能之间缺乏同构性。