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Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is a common and disabling condition characterized by excessive fear and avoidance of public scrutiny. Psychoradiology studies have suggested that the emotional and behavior deficits in SAD are associated with abnormalities in regional brain function and functional connectivity. However, little is known about whether intrinsic functional brain networks in patients with SAD are topologically disrupted. Here, we collected resting-state fMRI data from 33 drug-naive patients with SAD and 32 healthy controls (HC), constructed functional networks with 34 predefined regions based on previous meta-analytic research with task-based fMRI in SAD, and performed network-based statistic and graph-theory analyses. The network-based statistic analysis revealed a single connected abnormal circuitry including the frontolimbic circuit (termed the “fear circuit”, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, ventral medial prefrontal cortex and insula) and posterior cingulate/occipital areas supporting perceptual processing. In this single altered network, patients with SAD had higher functional connectivity than HC. At the global level, graph-theory analysis revealed that the patients exhibited a lower normalized characteristic path length than HC, which suggests a disorder-related shift of network topology toward randomized configurations. SAD-related deficits in nodal degree, efficiency and participation coefficient were detected in the parahippocampal gyrus, posterior cingulate cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, insula and the calcarine sulcus. Aspects of abnormal connectivity were associated with anxiety symptoms. These findings highlight the aberrant topological organization of functional brain network organization in SAD, which provides insights into the neural mechanisms underlying excessive fear and avoidance of social interactions in patients with debilitating social anxiety. •We defined 34 network nodes based on task-based SAD fMRI meta-analytic studies.•SAD had higher functional connectivity in a single connected component.•SAD had a shift of brain network topology toward randomized configurations.•Abnormal connectivity in SAD was significantly associated with anxiety symptoms.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a prevalent neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by atypical social communication and repetitive behaviors. In this study, we applied a multimodal approach to investigate brain structural connectivity, resting state activity, and surface area, as well as their associations with the core symptoms of ASD. Data from forty boys with ASD (mean age, 11.5 years; age range, 5.5–19.5) and forty boys with typical development (TD) (mean age, 12.3; age range, 5.8–19.7) were extracted from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange II (ABIDE II) for data analysis. We found significantly decreased structural connectivity, resting state brain activity, and surface area at the occipital cortex in boys with ASD compared to boys with TD. In addition, we found that resting state brain activity and surface area in the lateral occipital cortex was negatively correlated with communication scores in boys with ASD. Our results suggest that decreased structural connectivity and resting-state brain activity in the occipital cortex may impair the integration of verbal and non-verbal communication cues in boys with ASD, thereby impacting their social development. •We applied a multimodal approach to investigate the neuropathology of ASD.•ASD showed decreased fALFF and surface area at the occipital cortex.•ASD is associated with decreased FA and track length in left CCG and right UNC.•Functional and structural changes were associated with ASD communication scores.

The human ventral visual stream consists of several areas that are considered processing stages essential for perception and recognition. A fundamental microanatomical feature differentiating areas is cytoarchitecture, which refers to the distribution, size, and density of cells across cortical layers. Because cytoarchitectonic structure is measured in 20-micron-thick histological slices of postmortem tissue, it is difficult to assess (a) how anatomically consistent these areas are across brains and (b) how they relate to brain parcellations obtained with prevalent neuroimaging methods, acquired at the millimeter and centimeter scale. Therefore, the goal of this study was to (a) generate a cross-validated cytoarchitectonic atlas of the human ventral visual stream on a whole brain template that is commonly used in neuroimaging studies and (b) to compare this atlas to a recently published retinotopic parcellation of visual cortex (Wang et al., 2014). To achieve this goal, we generated an atlas of eight cytoarchitectonic areas: four areas in the occipital lobe (hOc1-hOc4v) and four in the fusiform gyrus (FG1-FG4), then we tested how the different alignment techniques affect the accuracy of the resulting atlas. Results show that both cortex-based alignment (CBA) and nonlinear volumetric alignment (NVA) generate an atlas with better cross-validation performance than affine volumetric alignment (AVA). Additionally, CBA outperformed NVA in 6/8 of the cytoarchitectonic areas. Finally, the comparison of the cytoarchitectonic atlas to a retinotopic atlas shows a clear correspondence between cytoarchitectonic and retinotopic areas in the ventral visual stream. The successful performance of CBA suggests a coupling between cytoarchitectonic areas and macroanatomical landmarks in the human ventral visual stream, and furthermore, that this coupling can be utilized for generating an accurate group atlas. In addition, the coupling between cytoarchitecture and retinotopy highlights the potential use of this atlas in understanding how anatomical features contribute to brain function. We make this cytoarchitectonic atlas freely available in both BrainVoyager and FreeSurfer formats (http://vpnl.stanford.edu/vcAtlas). The availability of this atlas will enable future studies to link cytoarchitectonic organization to other parcellations of the human ventral visual stream with potential to advance the understanding of this pathway in typical and atypical populations. •We provide a cross-validated cytoarchitectonic atlas of the human ventral stream.•The atlas is publically available in BrainVoyager and FreeSurfer formats.•Study compared how alignment methods affect atlas cross-validation performance.•Cortex-based alignment outperforms both affine and nonlinear volume alignments.•Coupling between cytoarchitectonic and retinotopic parcellations of ventral stream.

Working memory is imprecise, and these imprecisions can be explained by the combined influences of random diffusive error and systematic drift toward a set of stable states (\"attractors\"). However, the neural correlates of diffusion and drift remain unknown. Here, we investigated how delay-period activity in frontal and parietal cortex, which is known to correlate with the decline in behavioral memory precision observed with increasing memory load, might relate to diffusion and drift. We analyzed data from an existing experiment in which subjects performed delayed recall for line orientation, at different loads, during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning. To quantify the influence of drift and diffusion, we modeled subjects' behavior using a discrete attractor model and calculated within-subject correlation between frontal and parietal delay-period activity and whole-trial estimates of drift and diffusion. We found that although increases in frontal and parietal activity were associated with increases in both diffusion and drift, diffusion explained the most variance in frontal and parietal delay-period activity. In comparison, a subsequent whole-brain regression analysis showed that drift, rather than diffusion, explained the most variance in delay-period activity in lateral occipital cortex. These results are consistent with a model of the differential recruitment of general frontoparietal mechanisms in response to diffusive noise and of stimulus-specific biases in occipital cortex.

The ventral occipitotemporal (vOT) cortex serves as a core region for visual processing, and specific areas of this region show preferential activation for various visual categories such as faces and print. The emergence of such functional specialization in the human cortex represents a pivotal developmental process, which provides a basis for targeted and efficient information processing. For example, functional specialization to print in the left vOT is an important prerequisite for fluent reading. However, it remains unclear, which processes initiate the preferential cortical activations to characters arising in the vOT during child development. Using a multimodal neuroimaging approach with preschool children at familial risk for developmental dyslexia, we demonstrate how varying levels of expertise modulate the neural response to single characters, which represent the building blocks of print units. The level of expertise to characters was manipulated firstly through brief training of false-font speech–sound associations and secondly by comparing characters for which children differed in their level of familiarity and expertise accumulated through abundant exposure in their everyday environment. Neural correlates of character processing were tracked with simultaneous high-density electroencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging in a target detection task. We found training performance and expertise-dependent modulation of the visual event-related potential around 220 ms (N1) and the corresponding vOT activation. Additionally, trained false-font characters revealed stronger functional connectivity between the left fusiform gyrus (FFG) seed and left superior parietal/lateral occipital cortex regions with higher training performance. In sum, our results demonstrate that learning artificial-character speech–sound associations enhances activation to trained characters in the vOT and that the magnitude of this activation and the functional connectivity of the left FFG to the parieto-occipital cortex depends on learning performance. This pattern of results suggests emerging development of the reading network after brief training that parallels network specialization during reading acquisition. •Artificial character-speech sound training induced preferred N1 and vOT activation.•N1 and vOT BOLD tuning depends on training performance in prereaders.•Functional connectivity of left FFG and SPL also depends on training performance.•Level of expertise to character types modulates the N1 and vOT BOLD activation.•Results suggest a phonologically guided N1 and vOT tuning in children.

In everyday life, people need to respond appropriately to many types of emotional stimuli. Here, we investigate whether human occipital-temporal cortex (OTC) shows co-representation of the semantic category and affective content of visual stimuli. We also explore whether OTC transformation of semantic and affective features extracts information of value for guiding behavior. Participants viewed 1620 emotional natural images while functional magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired. Using voxel-wise modeling we show widespread tuning to semantic and affective image features across OTC. The top three principal components underlying OTC voxel-wise responses to image features encoded stimulus animacy, stimulus arousal and interactions of animacy with stimulus valence and arousal. At low to moderate dimensionality, OTC tuning patterns predicted behavioral responses linked to each image better than regressors directly based on image features. This is consistent with OTC representing stimulus semantic category and affective content in a manner suited to guiding behavior. The mechanisms of recognition and response to emotional stimuli are not fully understood. Here, the authors reveal tuning to semantic and emotional image features within occipital temporal cortex that efficiently encodes information suited to guiding behavior.

Reading comprehension is a complex task that depends on multiple cognitive and linguistic processes. According to the updated Simple View of Reading framework, in adults, individual variation in reading comprehension can be largely explained by combined variance in three component abilities: (1) decoding accuracy, (2) fluency, and (3) language comprehension. Here we asked whether the neural correlates of the three components are different in adults with dyslexia as compared to typically-reading adults and whether the relative contribution of these correlates to reading comprehension is similar in the two groups. We employed a novel naturalistic fMRI reading task to identify the neural correlates of individual differences in the three components using whole-brain and literature-driven regions-of-interest approaches. Across all participants, as predicted by the Simple View framework, we found distinct patterns of associations with linguistic and domain-general regions for the three components, and that the left-hemispheric neural correlates of language comprehension in the angular and posterior temporal gyri made the largest contributions to explaining out-of-scanner reading comprehension performance. These patterns differed between the two groups. In typical adult readers, better fluency was associated with greater activation of left occipitotemporal regions, better comprehension with lesser activation in prefrontal and posterior parietal regions, and there were no significant associations with decoding. In adults with dyslexia, better fluency was associated with greater activation of bilateral inferior parietal regions, better comprehension was associated with greater activation in some prefrontal clusters and lower in others, and better decoding skills were associated with lesser activation of bilateral prefrontal and posterior parietal regions. Extending the behavioral findings of skill-level differences in the relative contribution of the three components to reading comprehension, the relative contributions of the neural correlates to reading comprehension differed based on dyslexia status. These findings reveal some of the neural correlates of individual differences in the three components and the underlying mechanisms of reading comprehension deficits in adults with dyslexia.

The cerebral cortex develops rapidly in the last trimester of pregnancy. In preterm infants, brain development is very vulnerable because of their often complicated extra-uterine conditions. The aim of this study was to quantitatively describe cortical development in a cohort of 85 preterm infants with and without brain injury imaged at 30 and 40 weeks postmenstrual age (PMA). In the acquired T2-weighted MR images, unmyelinated white matter (UWM), cortical grey matter (CoGM), and cerebrospinal fluid in the extracerebral space (CSF) were automatically segmented. Based on these segmentations, cortical descriptors evaluating volume, surface area, thickness, gyrification index, and global mean curvature were computed at both time points, for the whole brain, as well as for the frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes separately. Additionally, visual scoring of brain abnormality was performed using a conventional scoring system at 40 weeks PMA. The evaluated descriptors showed larger change in the occipital lobes than in the other lobes. Moreover, the cortical descriptors showed an association with the abnormality scores: gyrification index and global mean curvature decreased, whereas, interestingly, median cortical thickness increased with increasing abnormality score. This was more pronounced at 40 weeks PMA than at 30 weeks PMA, suggesting that the period between 30 and 40 weeks PMA might provide a window of opportunity for intervention to prevent delay in cortical development.

We previously proposed a bipartite ‘dorsal–ventral’ model of human arcuate fasciculus (AF) morphology. This model does not, however, account for the ‘vertical,’ temporo-parietal subdivision of the AF described in earlier dissection and tractographic studies. In an effort to address the absence of the vertical AF (VAF) within ‘dorsal–ventral’ nomenclature, we conducted a dedicated tractographic and white-matter dissection study of this tract and another short, vertical, posterior-hemispheric fascicle: the vertical occipital fasciculus (VOF). We conducted atlas-based, non-tensor, deterministic tractography in 30 single subjects from the Human Connectome Project database and verified our results using an average diffusion atlas compiled from 842 separate normal subjects. We also performed white-matter dissection in four post-mortem specimens. Our tractography results demonstrate that the VAF is, in fact, a bipartite system connecting the ventral parietal and temporal regions, with variable connective, and no volumetric lateralization. The VOF is a non-lateralized, non-segmented system connecting lateral occipital areas with basal–temporal regions. Importantly, the VOF was spatially dissociated from the VAF. As the VAF demonstrates no overall connective or volumetric lateralization, we postulate its distinction from the AF system and propose its re-naming to the ‘temporo-parietal aslant tract,’ (TPAT), with unique dorsal and ventral subdivisions. Our tractography results were supported by diffusion atlas and white-matter dissection findings.

How does sensory experience shape the development of the visual brain? To answer this eluding question, we examine brain responses to visual categories in a rare group of cataract-reversal individuals who experienced a short transient period of early blindness. Encoding of low-level visual properties is impaired in the early visual cortex (EVC) of cataract-reversal participants, whereas categorical responses in downstream ventral occipito-temporal cortex (VOTC) are preserved. In controls, degrading visual input to mimic the visual deficits of cataracts produces cascading disruptions extending from EVC to VOTC, unlike in the cataract group. A deep neural network trained on altered visual input reproduces this dissociation, supporting the brain findings. These results demonstrate that while EVC is permanently affected by early deprivation, categorical coding in VOTC shows resilience, highlighting different sensitive periods for specific brain regions and computations. This study shows that transient blindness at birth leaves lasting effects on early visual functions, while higher visual regions encoding categories remain unaffected, revealing different sensitive periods for different functions in vision.