The relationship between spatial configuration and functional connectivity of brain regions
- University of Oxford, United Kingdom
- Washington University in St. Louis, United States
- King's College London, United Kingdom
- Radboud University Medical Centre, Netherlands
Abstract
Brain connectivity is often considered in terms of the communication between functionally distinct brain regions. Many studies have investigated the extent to which patterns of coupling strength between multiple neural populations relates to behaviour. For example, studies have used 'functional connectivity fingerprints' to characterise individuals' brain activity. Here, we investigate the extent to which the exact spatial arrangement of cortical regions interacts with measures of brain connectivity. We find that the shape and exact location of brain regions interact strongly with the modelling of brain connectivity, and present evidence that the spatial arrangement of functional regions is strongly predictive of non-imaging measures of behaviour and lifestyle. We believe that, in many cases, cross-subject variations in the spatial configuration of functional brain regions are being interpreted as changes in functional connectivity. Therefore, a better understanding of these effects is important when interpreting the relationship between functional imaging data and cognitive traits.
Data availability
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Human Connectome ProjectFreely available upon agreeing with Open Access Data Use Terms and Restricted Data Use Terms ( https://www.humanconnectome.org/study/hcp-young-adult/document/quick-reference-open-access-vs-restricted-data).
Article and author information
Author details
Janine Diane Bijsterbosch
Funding
National Institutes of Health (1U54MH091657)
- David C Van Essen
Wellcome (098369/Z/12/Z)
- Stephen M Smith
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (864-12-003)
- Christian F Beckmann
Wellcome (091509/Z/10/Z)
- Stephen M Smith
Wellcome (203139/Z/16/Z)
- Stephen M Smith
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: HCP data were acquired using protocols approved by the Washington University institutional review board. Informed consent was obtained from subjects. Anonymised data are publicly available from ConnectomeDB (db.humanconnectome.org; Hodge et al., 2016). Certain parts of the dataset used in this study, such as the age of the subjects, are available subject to restricted data usage terms, requiring researchers to ensure that the anonymity of subjects is protected (Van Essen et al., 2013).
Copyright
© 2018, Bijsterbosch et al.
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.
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The relationship between spatial configuration and functional connectivity of brain regions
eLife 7:e32992.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.32992
Further reading
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The exact location of certain brain regions is linked to intelligence, life satisfaction and other behavioural factors.
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- Neuroscience
When subjects navigate through spatial environments, grid cells exhibit firing fields that are arranged in a triangular grid pattern. Direct recordings of grid cells from the human brain are rare. Hence, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies proposed an indirect measure of entorhinal grid-cell activity, quantified as hexadirectional modulation of fMRI activity as a function of the subject’s movement direction. However, it remains unclear how the activity of a population of grid cells may exhibit hexadirectional modulation. Here, we use numerical simulations and analytical calculations to suggest that this hexadirectional modulation is best explained by head-direction tuning aligned to the grid axes, whereas it is not clearly supported by a bias of grid cells toward a particular phase offset. Firing-rate adaptation can result in hexadirectional modulation, but the available cellular data is insufficient to clearly support or refute this option. The magnitude of hexadirectional modulation furthermore depends considerably on the subject’s navigation pattern, indicating that future fMRI studies could be designed to test which hypothesis most likely accounts for the fMRI measure of grid cells. Our findings also underline the importance of quantifying the properties of human grid cells to further elucidate how hexadirectional modulations of fMRI activity may emerge.
