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- Title
Self-Regulation of the Posterior–Frontal Brain Activity with Real-Time fMRI Neurofeedback to Influence Perceptual Discrimination.
- Authors
Kim, Sunjung; Dalboni da Rocha, Josue Luiz; Birbaumer, Niels; Sitaram, Ranganatha
- Abstract
The Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW) hypothesis states that the visual percept is available to conscious awareness only if recurrent long-distance interactions among distributed brain regions activate neural circuitry extending from the posterior areas to prefrontal regions above a certain excitation threshold. To directly test this hypothesis, we trained 14 human participants to increase blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signals with real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging (rtfMRI)-based neurofeedback simultaneously in four specific regions of the occipital, temporal, insular and prefrontal parts of the brain. Specifically, we hypothesized that the up-regulation of the mean BOLD activity in the posterior–frontal brain regions lowers the perceptual threshold for visual stimuli, while down-regulation raises the threshold. Our results showed that participants could perform up-regulation (Wilcoxon test, session 1: p = 0.022; session 4: p = 0.041) of the posterior–frontal brain activity, but not down-regulation. Furthermore, the up-regulation training led to a significant reduction in the visual perceptual threshold, but no substantial change in perceptual threshold was observed after the down-regulation training. These findings show that the up-regulation of the posterior–frontal regions improves the perceptual discrimination of the stimuli. However, further questions as to whether the posterior–frontal regions can be down-regulated at all, and whether down-regulation raises the perceptual threshold, remain unanswered.
- Subjects
DIFFERENTIATION (Cognition); FUNCTIONAL magnetic resonance imaging; NEURAL circuitry; VISUAL perception; BIOFEEDBACK training
- Publication
Brain Sciences (2076-3425), 2024, Vol 14, Issue 7, p713
- ISSN
2076-3425
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3390/brainsci14070713