Kohl Simon H, Melies Pia, Uttecht Johannes, Lührs Michael, Bell Laura, Mehler David M A, Soekadar Surjo R, Viswanathan Shivakumar, Konrad Kerstin
JARA-Institute Molecular Neuroscience and Neuroimaging (INM-11), Forschungszentrum Jülich, Jülich, Germany.
Child Neuropsychology Section, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy, Faculty of Medicine, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany.
Imaging Neurosci (Camb). 2023 Sep 7;1. doi: 10.1162/imag_a_00014. eCollection 2023.
The right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) is a core hub in neural networks associated with reorienting of attention and social cognition. However, it remains unknown whether participants can learn to actively modulate their rTPJ activity via neurofeedback. Here, we explored the feasibility of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)-based neurofeedback in modulating rTPJ activity and its effect on rTPJ functions such as reorienting of attention and visual perspective taking. In a bidirectional regulation control group design, 50 healthy participants were reinforced to either up- or downregulate rTPJ activation over 4 days of training. Both groups showed an increase in rTPJ activity right from the beginning of the training but only the upregulation group maintained this effect, while the downregulation group showed a decline from the initial rTPJ activation. This suggests a learning effect in the downregulation exclusively, making it challenging to draw definitive conclusions about the effectiveness of rTPJ upregulation training. However, we observed group-specific effects on the behavioral level. We found a significant group x time interaction effect in the performance of the reorienting of attention task and group-specific changes, with decreased reaction times (RTs) in the upregulation group and increased RTs in the downregulation group across all conditions after the neurofeedback training. Those with low baseline performance showed greater improvements. In the perspective-taking task, however, only time effects were observed that were non-group-specific. These findings demonstrate that fNIRS-based neurofeedback is a feasible method to modulate rTPJ functions with preliminary evidence of neurophysiologically specific effects, thus paving the way for future applications of non-invasive rTPJ modulation in neuropsychiatric disorders.
右侧颞顶联合区（rTPJ）是与注意力重新定向和社会认知相关的神经网络中的核心枢纽。然而，参与者是否能够通过神经反馈学会主动调节其rTPJ活动仍不清楚。在这里，我们探讨了基于功能近红外光谱（fNIRS）的神经反馈调节rTPJ活动的可行性及其对rTPJ功能（如注意力重新定向和视觉观点采择）的影响。在双向调节对照组设计中，50名健康参与者在4天的训练中被强化上调或下调rTPJ激活。两组在训练开始时rTPJ活动均增加，但只有上调组维持了这一效果，而下调组的rTPJ激活从初始水平下降。这表明仅在下调中有学习效应，这使得就rTPJ上调训练的有效性得出明确结论具有挑战性。然而，我们在行为水平上观察到了组特异性效应。我们发现在注意力重新定向任务的表现和组特异性变化中存在显著的组×时间交互效应，神经反馈训练后，上调组的反应时间（RTs）缩短，下调组在所有条件下的RTs均增加。基线表现较低的参与者改善更大。然而，在观点采择任务中，仅观察到非组特异性的时间效应。这些发现表明，基于fNIRS的神经反馈是调节rTPJ功能的一种可行方法，有初步的神经生理学特异性效应证据，从而为未来非侵入性rTPJ调节在神经精神疾病中的应用铺平了道路。
