The cortical connectivity of the periaqueductal gray and the conditioned response to the threat of breathlessness

  1. Olivia K Faull  Is a corresponding author
  2. Kyle TS Pattinson
  1. University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Abstract

Previously we observed differential activation in individual columns of the periaqueductal grey (PAG) during breathlessness and its conditioned anticipation (Faull et al., 2016). Here, we have extended this work by determining how the individual columns of the PAG interact with higher cortical centres, both at rest and in the context of breathlessness threat. Activation was observed in ventrolateral PAG (vlPAG) and lateral PAG (lPAG), where activity scaled with breathlessness intensity ratings, revealing a potential interface between sensation and cognition during breathlessness. At rest the lPAG was functionally correlated with cortical sensorimotor areas, conducive to facilitating fight/flight responses, and demonstrated increased synchronicity with the amygdala during breathlessness. The vlPAG showed fronto-limbic correlations at rest, whereas during breathlessness anticipation, reduced functional synchronicity was seen to both lPAG and motor structures, conducive to freezing behaviours. These results move us towards understanding how the PAG might be intricately involved in human responses to threat.

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Olivia K Faull

    FMRIB Centre, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
    For correspondence
    olivia.faull@ndcn.ox.ac.uk
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-0897-7142
  2. Kyle TS Pattinson

    FMRIB Centre, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Funding

JABBS (HMR00210)

  • Olivia K Faull
  • Kyle TS Pattinson

National Institute for Health Research

  • Kyle TS Pattinson

Medical Research Council

  • Kyle TS Pattinson

Commonwealth Scholarship Commission

  • Olivia K Faull

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: The Oxfordshire Clinical Research Ethics Committee approved the study and volunteers gave written, informed consent prior to participation.

Copyright

© 2017, Faull & Pattinson

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.

Metrics

  • 3,405
    views
  • 485
    downloads
  • 68
    citations

Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.

Download links

A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.

Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)

Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)

Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)

  1. Olivia K Faull
  2. Kyle TS Pattinson
(2017)
The cortical connectivity of the periaqueductal gray and the conditioned response to the threat of breathlessness
eLife 6:e21749.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.21749

Share this article

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.21749

Further reading

    1. Neuroscience
    Paul I Jaffe, Gustavo X Santiago-Reyes ... Russell A Poldrack
    Research Article

    Evidence accumulation models (EAMs) are the dominant framework for modeling response time (RT) data from speeded decision-making tasks. While providing a good quantitative description of RT data in terms of abstract perceptual representations, EAMs do not explain how the visual system extracts these representations in the first place. To address this limitation, we introduce the visual accumulator model (VAM), in which convolutional neural network models of visual processing and traditional EAMs are jointly fitted to trial-level RTs and raw (pixel-space) visual stimuli from individual subjects in a unified Bayesian framework. Models fitted to large-scale cognitive training data from a stylized flanker task captured individual differences in congruency effects, RTs, and accuracy. We find evidence that the selection of task-relevant information occurs through the orthogonalization of relevant and irrelevant representations, demonstrating how our framework can be used to relate visual representations to behavioral outputs. Together, our work provides a probabilistic framework for both constraining neural network models of vision with behavioral data and studying how the visual system extracts representations that guide decisions.

    1. Neuroscience
    Aneri Soni, Michael J Frank
    Research Article

    How and why is working memory (WM) capacity limited? Traditional cognitive accounts focus either on limitations on the number or items that can be stored (slots models), or loss of precision with increasing load (resource models). Here, we show that a neural network model of prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia can learn to reuse the same prefrontal populations to store multiple items, leading to resource-like constraints within a slot-like system, and inducing a trade-off between quantity and precision of information. Such ‘chunking’ strategies are adapted as a function of reinforcement learning and WM task demands, mimicking human performance and normative models. Moreover, adaptive performance requires a dynamic range of dopaminergic signals to adjust striatal gating policies, providing a new interpretation of WM difficulties in patient populations such as Parkinson’s disease, ADHD, and schizophrenia. These simulations also suggest a computational rather than anatomical limit to WM capacity.