Biology subjects

Cerliani, L.

Publications and source records attributed to Cerliani, L..

6 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

Representational geometry of emotional empathy in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and in the mid-posterior insula.

Facial expressions provide rapid and informative cues about others emotional and mental states, playing a critical role in social interactions. However, whether distinct emotional expressions reflect discrete neural processes or arise from varying combinations of underlying affective dimensions such as arousal and valence remains a subject of investigation. Crucially, these accounts need not be mutually exclusive: different brain regions may encode emotional expressions along both categorical and dimensional axes to varying degrees. To test this hypothesis, we probed different brain systems involved in emotion recognition - the ventral attentional network and the cortical limbic system centered on the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) - to investigate the extent to which these networks and their subregions encode emotional facial expressions in terms of (1) perceived arousal, (2) arousal+valence, or (3) six discrete emotion categories (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, pain, sadness). To this aim, we modelled the fMRI signal from perceiving movies of facial emotional expressions with ratings for either arousal, arousal+valence or emotion category using representational similarity analysis (RSA) - a method that aims at assessing which ratings model better represents how the perception of facial expressions is reflected by the fMRI parameter estimates across all the voxels within a brain region. This analysis showed that regions in the vmPFC network, including the subgenual cingulate and the medial OFC, are sensitive to ratings for distinct emotion category and for arousal+valence - significantly more so for the former - while they fail to show sensitivity for arousal ratings alone. In the ventral attentional network, the mid-posterior insula showed a similar profile, while the most posterior and ventral insular show evidence of encoding arousal+valence, but not for emotion category or arousal alone. Our findings support the idea that the vmPFC and the mid-posterior insula play a role in encoding emotion-specific and valence representations beyond general arousal processing. These results contribute to understanding how integrative brain regions support emotional empathy and social cognition.

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bioRxiv2021

Depth-resolved intersubject functional correlation of 7T BOLD signals reveals increased stimulus related information sharing across deep layers in premotor and parietal nodes for predictable actions

While the brain regions involved in action observation are relatively well documented in humans and primates, how these regions communicate to help understand and predict actions remains poorly understood. Traditional views emphasized a feed-forward architecture in which visual features are organized into increasingly complex representations that feed onto motor programs in parietal and then premotor cortices where the matching of observed actions upon the observers own motor programs contributes to action understanding. Predictive coding models place less emphasis on feed-forward connections and propose that feed-back connections from premotor regions back to parietal and visual neurons represent predictions about upcoming actions that can supersede visual inputs when actions become predictable, with visual input then merely representing prediction errors. Here we leverage the notion that feed-back connections target specific cortical layers to help adjudicate across these views. Specifically, we test whether observing sequences of hand actions in their natural order, which permits participants to predict upcoming actions, triggers more feed-back input to parietal regions than seeing the same actions in a scrambled sequence that hinders making predictions. Using submillimeter fMRI acquisition at 7T, we find that watching predictable sequences triggers more action-related activity (as measured using intersubject functional correlation) in the parietal cortical area PFt at depths receiving feed-back connections (layers III and V/VI) than watching the exact same actions in scrambled and hence unpredictable sequence. In addition, functional connectivity analysis performed using intersubject functional connectivity confirms that these increased action-related signals in PFt could originate from ventral premotor region BA44. This data showcases the utility of intersubject functional correlation in combination with 7T MRI to explore the architecture of social cognition under more naturalistic conditions, and provides evidence for models that emphasize the importance of feed-back connections in action prediction.

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bioRxiv2021

Atypical development of subcortico-cortical effective connectivity in autism

Hypersensitivity, stereotyped behaviors and attentional problems in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are compatible with inefficient filtering of undesired or irrelevant sensory information at early stages of neural processing. This could stem from delays in the neurotypical development of the functional segregation between cortical and subcortical brain processes, as suggested by previous findings of overconnectivity between primary sensory regions and deep brain nuclei in ASD. To test this hypothesis, we used dynamic causal modelling to quantify the effect of age on the development of (1) cortical functional segregation from subcortical activity and (2) directional influence of subcortical activity on cortical processing in 166 participants with ASD and 193 typically developing controls (TD) from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE). We found that in TD participants age was significantly associated with increased functional segregation of cortical sensory processing from subcortical activity, paralleled by a decreased influence of subcortical activity on cortical processing. Instead these effects were highly reduced and mostly absent in ASD participants, suggesting a delayed or arrested development of the segregation between subcortical and cortical sensory processing in ASD. This atypical configuration of subcortico-cortical connectivity in ASD can result in an excessive amount of unprocessed sensory information relayed to the cortex, which is likely to impact cognitive functioning in everyday situations where it is beneficial to limit the influence of basic sensory information on cognitive processing, such as activities requiring focused attention or social interactions.

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bioRxiv2020

Increased orbitofrontal connectivity in misophonia

For individuals with misophonia, specific innocuous sensory stimuli - such as hearing another person chewing or breathing - evoke strong negative emotional and physiological responses, such as extreme anger, disgust, stress and anxiety. Instead people with misophonia do not experience or display atypical reactions to generic aversive sounds such as screams or nails scratching on a blackboard. Misophonia appears to be unrelated to neurological trauma or hearing deficit, and features a characteristic developmental pattern. Its aetiology is currently unknown. The few previous fMRI studies on misophonia showed that sufferers feature increased dorsal anterior insula activity during trigger vs. generic aversive sounds. While this effect likely reflects the saliency associated with the perception of trigger sounds in people with misophonia, in the present fMRI study we investigate the neural mechanisms underlying the emotional reaction to trigger stimuli. To this aim, we probe the task-dependent connectivity of mid-cingulate, medial premotor and ventrolateral premotor cortex. We observe that only in participants with misophonia the presentation of trigger audio-visuals prompts an increased interaction of these three brain regions with the lateral orbitofrontal cortex. This brain region is crucial for behavioural inhibition mediated by cognitive and emotional content (such as in reward-reversal learning) and is part of the temporo-amygdala-orbitofrontal network, which integrates visceral and emotional states with cognition and behaviour. We also observe that in people with misophonia trigger sounds prompt a significant increase in the interaction between mid-cingulate and the primary auditory cortex. Our study replicates previous results and expands the network of brain regions involved in misophonia. The involvement of the orbitofrontal cortex suggests a defective functioning of high-order integrative processes allowing the reappraisal of experience-dependent negative emotional association with harmless sensory stimuli, and sheds light on the mechanisms underlying the compulsive nature of the misophonic reaction. The increased interaction, rather than the overall activity, of the primary auditory cortex with the mid-cingulate supports the hypothesis that the emotional response in misophonia is subserved by an indirect auditory-limbic pathway processing the subjective valence of specific sounds, rather than their physical properties alone.

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bioRxiv2017

White matter correlates of hemi-face dominance in emotional expression

The neural underpinnings of human emotional expression are thought to be unevenly distributed among the two brain hemispheres. However, little is known on the anatomy supporting this claim, particularly in the cerebral white matter. Here, we explored the relationship between hemi-face dominance in emotional expression and cerebral white matter asymmetries in 33 healthy participants. Measures of emotional expression were derived from pictures of the participants faces in a happy smiling and a sad frowning conditions. Chimeric faces were constructed by mirroring right and left hemi-faces, as done in previous studies, resulting in a left mirrored and right mirrored chimeric face per picture. To gain measures of hemi-face dominance per participant, a jury of 20 additional participants rated which chimeric face shows higher intensity of emotional expressivity, by marking a 155mm line between the two versions. Measures of the asymmetry of the uncinate, the cingulum and the three branches of superior longitudinal fasciculi were derived from diffusion weighted imaging tractography dissections. Group effect analyses indicated that the degree of asymmetry in emotional expression was not as prominent as reported in the literature and showed a large inter-individual variability. The degree of asymmetry in emotional expression was, however, significantly associated with the asymmetries in connective properties of the fronto-temporal and fronto-parietal tracts, specifically the uncinate fasciculus and the first branch of the superior longitudinal fasciculus. Therefore, this result raises novel hypotheses on the relationship of specific white matter tracts and emotional expression, especially their role in mood disorders. Ethical statementO_LINone of the authors have a conflict of interest C_LIO_LIData collection from human participants was approved by the Comite de Protection des Personnes "CPP Ile de France V" C_LIO_LIAll participants provided written informed consent C_LIO_LIFunding from ERC (grant agreement No. 818521) and "Agence Nationale de la Recherche" [grants numbers ANR-13-JSV4-0001-01 an ANR-10-IAIHU-06] C_LI

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bioRxiv2017

Advanced Lesion Symptom Mapping Analyses And Implementation As BCBtoolkit

BackgroundPatients with brain lesions provide a unique opportunity to understand the functioning of the human mind. However, even when focal, brain lesions have local and remote effects that impact functionally and structurally connected circuits. Similarly, function emerges from the interaction between brain areas rather than their sole activity. For instance, category fluency requires the association between executive, semantic and language production functions.\n\nFindingsHere we provide, for the first time, a set of complementary solutions to measure the impact of a given lesion upon the neuronal circuits. Our methods, which were applied to 37 patients with a focal frontal brain lesion, revealed a large set of directly and indirectly disconnected brain regions that had significantly impacted category fluency performance. The directly disconnected regions corresponded to areas that are classically considered as functionally engaged in verbal fluency and categorization tasks. These regions were also organized into larger directly and indirectly disconnected functional networks, including the left ventral fronto-parietal network, whose cortical thickness correlated with performance on category fluency.\n\nConclusionsThe combination of structural and functional connectivity together with cortical thickness estimates reveals the remote effects of brain lesions, provide for the identification of the affected networks and strengthen our understanding of their relationship with cognitive and behavioural measures. The methods presented are available and freely accessible in the BCBtoolkit as supplementary software (http://toolkit.bcblab.com).

neuroscience↗