Travis Mills

Detection and Localization of Hippocampal Activity Using Beamformers with MEG: A Detailed Investigation Using Simulations and Empirical Data

The ability to detect neuronal activity emanating from deep brain structures such as the hippocampus using magnetoencephalography has been debated in the literature. While a significant number of recent publications reported activations from deep brain structures, others reported their inability to detect such activity even when other detection modalities confirmed its presence. In this article, we relied on realistic simulations to show that both sides of this debate are correct and that these findings are reconcilable. We show that the ability to detect such activations in evoked responses depends on the signal strength, the amount of brain noise background, the experimental design parameters, and the methodology used to detect them. Furthermore, we show that small signal strengths require contrasts with control conditions to be detected, particularly in the presence of strong brain noise backgrounds. We focus on one localization technique, the adaptive spatial filter (beamformer), and examine its strengths and weaknesses in reconstructing hippocampal activations, in the presence of other strong brain sources such as visual activations, and compare the performance of the vector and scalar beamformers under such conditions. We show that although a weight‐normalized beamformer combined with a multisphere head model is not biased in the presence of uncorrelated random noise, it can be significantly biased in the presence of correlated brain noise. Furthermore, we show that the vector beamformer performs significantly better than the scalar under such conditions. We corroborate our findings empirically using real data and demonstrate our ability to detect and localize such sources. Hum Brain Mapp, 2011.

Unattended emotional faces elicit early lateralized amygdala–frontal and fusiform activations

Human adaptive behaviour to potential threats involves specialized brain responses allowing rapid and reflexive processing of the sensory input and a more directed processing for later evaluation of the nature of the threat. The amygdalae are known to play a key role in emotion processing. It is suggested that the amygdalae process threat-related information through a fast subcortical route and slower cortical feedback. Evidence from human data supporting this hypothesis is lacking. The present study investigated event-related neural responses during processing of facial emotions in the unattended hemifield using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and found activations of the amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex to fear as early as 100 ms. The right amygdala exhibited temporally dissociated activations to input from different visual fields, suggesting early subcortical versus later cortical processing of fear. We also observed asymmetrical fusiform activity related to lateralized feed-forward processing of the faces in the visual-ventral stream. Results demonstrate fast, automatic, and parallel processing of unattended emotional faces, providing important insights into the specific and dissociated neural pathways in emotion and face perception.

Brain Noise Is Task Dependent and Region Specific

The emerging organization of anatomical and functional connections during human brain development is thought to facilitate global integration of information. Recent empirical and computational studies have shown that this enhanced capacity for information processing enables a diversified dynamic repertoire that manifests in neural activity as irregularity and noise. However, transient functional networks unfold over multiple time, scales and the embedding of a particular region depends not only on development, but also on the manner in which sensory and cognitive systems are engaged. Here we show that noise is a facet of neural activity that is also sensitive to the task context and is highly region specific. Children (6-16 yr) and adults (20-41 yr) performed a one-back face recognition task with inverted and upright faces. Neuromagnetic activity was estimated at several hundred sources in the brain by applying a beamforming technique to the magnetoencephalogram (MEG). During development, neural activity became more variable across the whole brain, with most robust increases in medial parietal regions, such as the precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex. For young children and adults, activity evoked by upright faces was more variable and noisy compared with inverted faces, and this effect was reliable only in the right fusiform gyrus. These results are consistent with the notion that upright faces engender a variety of integrative neural computations, such as the relations among facial features and their holistic constitution. This study shows that transient changes in functional integration modulated by task demand are evident in the variability of regional neural activity.

Response Inhibition in Adults and Teenagers: Spatiotemporal Differences in the Prefrontal Cortex.

Inhibition is a core executive function reliant on the frontal lobes that shows protracted maturation through to adulthood. We investigated the spatiotemporal characteristics of response inhibition during a visual go/no-go task in 14 teenagers and 14 adults using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and a contrast between two no-go experimental conditions designed to eliminate a common confound in earlier studies comparing go with no-go trials. Source analyses were performed using an event-related beamformer algorithm with co-registered individual structural MRIs. Performance was controlled to be similar across subjects. Analyses of MEG data revealed bilateral prefrontal activity in the inhibitory condition for both age groups, but with different spatiotemporal patterns: around 300ms after stimulus onset in middle frontal gyri in teenagers vs. around 260ms in inferior frontal gyri in adults. Moreover, the inhibition of a prepotent motor response showed a stronger recruitment of the left hemisphere in teenagers than in adults and of the right hemisphere in adults than in teenagers. These findings provide high-resolution temporal and spatial information regarding response inhibition in adolescents compared to adults, independent of motor components and performance differences.

Characterizing the Normal Developmental Trajectory of Expressive Language Lateralization Using Magnetoencephalography

To characterize the developmental trajectory for expressive language representation and to test competing explanations for the relative neuroplasticity of language in childhood, we studied 28 healthy children and adolescents (aged 5-19 years) participating in a covert verb generation task in magnetoencephalography. Lateralization of neuromagnetic responses in the frontal lobe was quantified using a bootstrap statistical thresholding procedure for differential beamformer analyses. We observed a significant positive correlation between left hemisphere lateralization and age. Findings suggest that adult-typical left hemisphere lateralization emerges from an early bilateral language network, which may explain the pediatric advantage for interhemispheric plasticity of language.

Recognising upright and inverted faces: MEG source localisation

Face recognition is a complex cognitive task that involves a distributed network of neural sources. While some components of this network have been identified, the temporal sequence of these components is not well understood. Magnetoencephalography (MEG), analyzed with a spatial filtering source localisation algorithm, was used to determine frontal contributions to face recognition. We tested 22 adults (mean age 26.3 years; 10 females). Upright and inverted faces were presented in counter-balanced blocks and subjects identified repetitions in a 1-back protocol. MEG data were recorded continuously from a 151 channel CTF machine and source localised to each participants MRI. The classic face components, M100 and M170, were seen for upright and inverted faces with M100 localizing to bilateral occipital areas and M170 to bilateral fusiform areas. A third component, M240, showed high global field power to correctly recognised repeated faces and localised to right middle frontal and insula sources at 240 ms for upright faces and bilateral mid-frontal sources for inverted faces. The effect of repetition was examined and a source identified at 250 ms in the cingulate, for inverted faces. These results provide timing information on frontal lobe activation, seen reliably in fMRI memory studies; the immediate recognition of repeated faces activates the right frontal sources at 240-250 ms, with bilateral activation to repeated inverted faces, perhaps due to increased task difficulty.

Face processing in adolescents with and without epilepsy

Children with temporal lobe epilepsy frequently suffer memory deficits, often marked in face processing. To determine the neural correlates of this dysfunction, we investigated face processing in adolescents with intractable epilepsy compared to typically developing controls. The M170 and M220 MEG event-related fields (ERFs) were recorded while the adolescents completed an n-back task on blocks of upright and inverted faces. Source analyses of the ERF data were performed using an event-related beamforming technique that allowed the detection of multiple sources. The control adolescents showed the expected waveforms and inversion effects, although there were differences in source localization, compared to the adult literature. The participants with epilepsy had poor performance on the tasks. The adolescents with extra-temporal lobe epilepsy showed both the M170 and M220 but the source localizations were highly atypical. The patients with right temporal lobe epilepsy had an absent or highly atypical M220, a component related to face recognition processes. We hypothesize that the children with extra-temporal lobe epilepsy have difficulty with face encoding processes while the patients with right temporal lobe epilepsy have specific difficulty with face recognition.

Spatio-temporal localisation of attentional orienting to gaze and peripheral cues.

Another persons eye gaze often triggers our attention such that we follow their direction of gaze. We investigated how the neural mechanisms for processing eye-gaze and spatial attention interact using magnetoencephalography (MEG) in young adults. In a cueing paradigm, a face was presented centrally with left or right averted eye-gaze serving as the directional cue in the eye-gaze condition. In the peripheral cue condition, the face with a straight gaze was presented with a cue stimulus appearing on the left or right of the face. Cue validity was 50%. MEG was recorded during the two conditions and event-related beamforming was used to determine the timing and location of the brain activity related to the two types of cueing. The MEG data indicated that generally the network of activation in response to our two cue types was similar. In contrast, MEG responses to the targets demonstrated one main peak at 286-306 ms for the eye-gaze cue condition while two peaks were found at 238-258 ms and 286-306 ms for the peripheral cue condition. Activation was also consistently larger for the invalid than valid trials. Source images for the invalid minus valid contrasts for the 238-258 ms window showed significant activation only in the peripheral cueing condition, in the left temporoparietal junction and left inferior frontal gyrus. In the 286-306 ms window, both conditions showed left medial frontal activations. Thus, peripheral cues showed more rapid neural processing than the eye-gaze cues, with the second component being common to both, reflecting in part common processing. We suggest that attentional processing was maximal in the left hemisphere, as the right hemisphere was likely engaged in processing the face information.

Face Processing in Children: Novel MEG Findings

Face processing improves steadily across childhood, yet few studies have investigated the development of the neural sources underlying these processes. ERP studies have demonstrated marked developmental changes in early brain processes and these show systematic age-related changes. Using MEG, we investigated the developmental changes in brain sources in a face processing task.

Developmental trajectory of face processing revealed by integrative dynamics

Given their unique connectivity, a primary function of brain networks must be to transfer and integrate information. Therefore, the way in which information is integrated by individual nodes of the network may be an informative aspect of cognitive processing. Here we present a method inspired by telecommunications research that utilizes time–frequency fluctuations of neural activity to infer how information is integrated by individual nodes of the network. We use a queueing theoretical model to interpret empirical data in terms of information processing and integration. In particular, we demonstrate, in participants aged from 6 to 41 years, that the well-known face inversion phenomenon may be explained in terms of information integration. Our model suggests that inverted faces may be associated with shorter and more frequent neural integrative stages, indicating fractured processing and consistent with the notion that inverted faces are perceived by parts. Conversely, our model suggests that upright faces may be associated with a smaller number of sustained episodes of integration, indicating more involved processing, akin to holistic and configural processing. These differences in how upright and inverted faces are processed became more pronounced during development, indicating a gradual specialization for face perception. These effects were robustly expressed in the right fusiform gyrus (all groups), as well as right parahippocampal gyrus (children and adolescents only) and left inferior temporal cortex (adults only).