Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 9
. Pain study of reward circuitry in healthy control subjects. In this figure, adapted with permission
from Becerra et al. (19), representative coronal slices containing "classic" reward circuitry [GOb, SLEA,
ventral striatum (VS), ventral tegmentum/periacqueductal gray area (VT/PAG)] are segregated into early and
late phases of BOLD signal change following the 46(C stimulus (left and middle columns). As in Figures 6,
7b, and 8a, the statistical maps are overlaid in pseudocolor on gray scale average structural maps. The right
column of statistical maps shows the overlap (red) of early (yellow) and late (blue) phase activation. Time
courses of % signal change vs. time are shown in the column at far right for each structure. To aid anatomic
localization, the anterior-posterior coordinate in mm from the anterior commissure for each slice is shown in
the far left column. For this figure, activated pixels are thresholded at
p
< 5 + 10
-4
.
that subsets of neurons may respond to one type of rewarding stimulus but not
another (51,52). As some of these neuroimaging studies (Figure 11) only
focused on select brain regions, such as the GOb, anterior cingulate cortex, or
amygdala, or did not have the spatial resolution to observe a subset of
subcortical regions, the relative prevalence of documented brain activity in some
brain regions is overweighted. Although the majority of these studies involved a
motor component for the experimental task, the bulk of activations reported did
not involve regions associated with some aspect of motor control (i.e., dorsal
caudate, putamen, globus pallidus, posterior cingulate gyrus, and thalamus).
Furthermore, activation patterns in subcortical gray matter and paralimbic cortex
were similar between experiments using the passive presentation of social/
aesthetic stimuli, appetitive stimuli, and drug stimuli, and those using tasks that
included motor performance. The experimental results summarized in Figure 11
