Biology subjects

Huckins, J. F.

Publications and source records attributed to Huckins, J. F..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2024

Time spent in conversation over meals predicts default network function: Evidence from a passive mobile-sensing and fMRI study.

Sharing meals with others, often referred to as commensality, fosters social connection and may have been essential to human brain evolution. Here, we investigate whether shared meals impact social brain processes through the conversations they afford. If so, then time spent in conversation over meals should affect the default network- a set of interconnected cortical regions reliably associated with the social exchange of ideas. To test this possibility, we combined passive-mobile sensing with neuroimaging. Undergraduate participants had an application on their smartphone for two months that unobtrusively captured their time spent in conversation, as well as their location on and around campus. In between these two months, participants completed a resting state scan. Time spent in conversations around meals (e.g., at cafeterias and restaurants) during the prior month predicted greater functional connectivity in the dorsomedial default network subsystem, specifically between the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) portion and the rest of the subsystem regions. This relationship was preferential to: (1) time spent in conversation over the past (vs. future) month, (2) connectivity with the LIFG (vs. other dorsomedial subsystem nodes), (3) the dorsomedial subsystem (vs. other default network subsystems), (4) eateries (vs. other locations), and (5) time spent around conversation at eateries, rather than time at eateries more generally. Follow-up analyses further revealed results were driven by a ventral portion of the LIFG, with peaks in voxel-connectivity associated with language, social, memory, and affective processes, as determined by the meta-analytic platform, NeuroSynth. Time spent in conversation over meals may exercise social cognitive processes supported by the dorsomedial subsystem, a network key to social communication, understanding, and connection.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2020

Hybrid Hyperalignment: A single high-dimensional model of shared information embedded in cortical patterns of response and functional connectivity

Shared information content is represented across brains in idiosyncratic functional topographies. Hyperalignment addresses these idiosyncrasies by using neural responses to project individuals brain data into a common model space while maintaining the geometric relationships between distinct activity patterns. The dimensions of this common model can encode any kind of functional profiles shared across individuals, such as cortical response profiles collected during a common time-locked stimulus presentation (e.g. movie viewing) or functional connectivity profiles. Performing hyperalignment with either response-based or connectivity-based input data derives transformations to project individuals neural data from anatomical space into the common model such that functional information is optimally aligned across brains. Previously, only response or connectivity profiles were used in the derivation of these transformations. In this study, we used three separate data sets collected while participants watched feature films to derive transformations representing both response-based and connectivity-based information with a single algorithm. Our new method, hybrid hyperalignment, aligns response-based information as well as or better than response hyperalignment while simultaneously aligning connectivity-based information better than connectivity hyperalignment, all in one information space. These results suggest that a single common information space could encode both shared cortical response and functional connectivity profiles across individuals.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

Fusing Mobile Phone Sensing and Brain Imaging to Assess Depression in College Students: A Proof-of-Concept study

As smartphone usage has become increasingly prevalent in our society, so have rates of depression, particularly among young adults. Individual differences in smartphone usage patterns have been shown to reflect individual differences in underlying affective processes such as depression (Wang et al., 2018). In the current study, we identified a positive relationship between smartphone screen time (e.g. phone unlock duration) and resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) between the subgenual cingulate cortex (sgCC), a brain region implicated in depression and antidepressant treatment response, and regions of the ventromedial/orbitofrontal cortex, such that increased phone usage was related to stronger connectivity between these regions. We then used this cluster to constrain subsequent analyses looking at depressive symptoms in the same cohort and observed partial replication in a separate cohort. We believe the data and analyses presented here provide relatively simplistic initial analyses which replicate and provide a first step in combining functional brain activity and smartphone usage patterns to better understand issues related to mental health. Smartphones are a prevalent part of modern life and the usage of mobile sensing data from smartphones promises to be an important tool for mental health diagnostics and neuroscience research.

neuroscience↗