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How cognitive performance-induced stress can influence right VLPFC activation: an fMRI study in healthy subjects and in patients with social phobia.

ABSTRACT: The neural bases of interactions between anxiety and cognitive control are not fully understood. We conducted an fMRI study in healthy participants and in patients with an anxiety disorder (social phobia) to determine the impact of stress on the brain network involved in cognitive control. Participants performed two working memory tasks that differed in their level of performance-induced stress. In both groups, the cognitive tasks activated a frontoparietal network, involved in working memory tasks. A supplementary activation was observed in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) in patients during the more stressful cognitive task. Region of interest analyses showed that activation in the right VLPFC decreased in the more stressful condition as compared to the less stressful one in healthy subjects and remain at a similar level in the two cognitive tasks in patients. This pattern was specific to the right when compared to the left VLPFC activation. Anxiety was positively correlated with right VLPFC activation across groups. Finally, left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) activation was higher in healthy subjects than in patients in the more stressful task. These findings demonstrate that in healthy subjects, stress induces an increased activation in left DLPFC, a critical region for cognitive control, and a decreased activation in the right VLPFC, an area associated with anxiety. In patients, the differential modulation between these dorsal and ventral PFC regions disappears. This absence of modulation may limit anxious patients' ability to adapt to demanding cognitive control tasks.

SUBMITTER: Koric L

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6869883 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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How cognitive performance-induced stress can influence right VLPFC activation: an fMRI study in healthy subjects and in patients with social phobia.

Koric Lejla L Volle Emmanuelle E Seassau Magali M Bernard Frédéric A FA Mancini Julien J Dubois Bruno B Pelissolo Antoine A Levy Richard R

Human brain mapping 20110718 8

The neural bases of interactions between anxiety and cognitive control are not fully understood. We conducted an fMRI study in healthy participants and in patients with an anxiety disorder (social phobia) to determine the impact of stress on the brain network involved in cognitive control. Participants performed two working memory tasks that differed in their level of performance-induced stress. In both groups, the cognitive tasks activated a frontoparietal network, involved in working memory ta ...[more]

PMID: 21769993

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Project description:ObjectivesIn healthy aging, the way people cope differently with cognitive and neural decline is influenced by exposure to cognitively enriching life-experiences. Education is one of them, so that in general, the higher the education, the better the expected cognitive performance in aging. At the neural level, it is not clear yet how education can differentiate resting state functional connectivity profiles and their cognitive underpinnings. Thus, with this study, we aimed to investigate whether the variable education allowed for a finer description of age-related differences in cognition and resting state FC.MethodsWe analyzed in 197 healthy individuals (137 young adults aged 20-35 and 60 older adults aged 55-80 from the publicly available LEMON database), a pool of cognitive and neural variables, derived from magnetic resonance imaging, in relation to education. Firstly, we assessed age-related differences, by comparing young and older adults. Then, we investigated the possible role of education in outlining such differences, by splitting the group of older adults based on their education.ResultsIn terms of cognitive performance, older adults with higher education and young adults were comparable in language and executive functions. Interestingly, they had a wider vocabulary compared to young adults and older adults with lower education. Concerning functional connectivity, the results showed significant age- and education-related differences within three networks: the Visual-Medial, the Dorsal Attentional, and the Default Mode network (DMN). For the DMN, we also found a relationship with memory performance, which strengthen the evidence that this network has a specific role in linking cognitive maintenance and FC at rest in healthy aging.DiscussionOur study revealed that education contributes to differentiating cognitive and neural profiles in healthy older adults. Also, the DMN could be a key network in this context, as it may reflect some compensatory mechanisms relative to memory capacities in older adults with higher education.

Dataset Information

How cognitive performance-induced stress can influence right VLPFC activation: an fMRI study in healthy subjects and in patients with social phobia.

Publications

How cognitive performance-induced stress can influence right VLPFC activation: an fMRI study in healthy subjects and in patients with social phobia.

Similar Datasets

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