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Areas activated during naturalistic reading comprehension overlap topological visual, auditory, and somatotomotor maps.

ABSTRACT: Cortical mapping techniques using fMRI have been instrumental in identifying the boundaries of topological (neighbor-preserving) maps in early sensory areas. The presence of topological maps beyond early sensory areas raises the possibility that they might play a significant role in other cognitive systems, and that topological mapping might help to delineate areas involved in higher cognitive processes. In this study, we combine surface-based visual, auditory, and somatomotor mapping methods with a naturalistic reading comprehension task in the same group of subjects to provide a qualitative and quantitative assessment of the cortical overlap between sensory-motor maps in all major sensory modalities, and reading processing regions. Our results suggest that cortical activation during naturalistic reading comprehension overlaps more extensively with topological sensory-motor maps than has been heretofore appreciated. Reading activation in regions adjacent to occipital lobe and inferior parietal lobe almost completely overlaps visual maps, whereas a significant portion of frontal activation for reading in dorsolateral and ventral prefrontal cortex overlaps both visual and auditory maps. Even classical language regions in superior temporal cortex are partially overlapped by topological visual and auditory maps. By contrast, the main overlap with somatomotor maps is restricted to a small region on the anterior bank of the central sulcus near the border between the face and hand representations of M-I. Hum Brain Mapp 37:2784-2810, 2016. © 2016 The Authors Human Brain Mapping Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

SUBMITTER: Sood MR

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4949687 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Areas activated during naturalistic reading comprehension overlap topological visual, auditory, and somatotomotor maps.

Sood Mariam R MR Sereno Martin I MI

Human brain mapping 20160407 8

Cortical mapping techniques using fMRI have been instrumental in identifying the boundaries of topological (neighbor-preserving) maps in early sensory areas. The presence of topological maps beyond early sensory areas raises the possibility that they might play a significant role in other cognitive systems, and that topological mapping might help to delineate areas involved in higher cognitive processes. In this study, we combine surface-based visual, auditory, and somatomotor mapping methods wi ...[more]

PMID: 27061771

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Project description:OBJECTIVE:The strength of presurgical language mapping using electrocorticography (ECoG) is its outstanding signal fidelity and temporal resolution, but the weakness includes limited spatial sampling at an individual patient level. By averaging naming-related high-gamma activity at nonepileptic regions across a large number of patients, we provided the functional cortical atlases animating the neural dynamics supporting visual-object and auditory-description naming at the whole brain level. METHODS:We studied 79 patients who underwent extraoperative ECoG recording as epilepsy presurgical evaluation, and generated time-frequency plots and animation videos delineating the dynamics of naming-related high-gamma activity at 70-110 Hz. RESULTS:Naming task performance elicited high-gamma augmentation in domain-specific lower-order sensory areas and inferior-precentral gyri immediately after stimulus onset. High-gamma augmentation subsequently involved widespread neocortical networks with left hemisphere dominance. Left posterior temporal high-gamma augmentation at several hundred milliseconds before response onset exhibited a double dissociation; picture naming elicited high-gamma augmentation preferentially in regions medial to the inferior-temporal gyrus, whereas auditory naming elicited high-gamma augmentation more laterally. The left lateral prefrontal regions including Broca's area initially exhibited high-gamma suppression subsequently followed by high-gamma augmentation at several hundred milliseconds before response onset during both naming tasks. Early high-gamma suppression within Broca's area was more intense during picture compared to auditory naming. Subsequent lateral-prefrontal high-gamma augmentation was more intense during auditory compared to picture naming. SIGNIFICANCE:This study revealed contrasting characteristics in the spatiotemporal dynamics of naming-related neural modulations between tasks. The dynamic atlases of visual and auditory language might be useful for planning of epilepsy surgery. Differential neural activation well explains some of the previously reported observations of domain-specific language impairments following resective epilepsy surgery. Video materials might be beneficial for the education of lay people about how the brain functions differentially during visual and auditory naming.

Dataset Information

Areas activated during naturalistic reading comprehension overlap topological visual, auditory, and somatotomotor maps.

Publications

Areas activated during naturalistic reading comprehension overlap topological visual, auditory, and somatotomotor maps.

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