Emotional face expression modulates occipital-frontal effective connectivity during memory formation in a bottom-up fashion.

ABSTRACT: This study investigated the role of bottom-up and top-down neural mechanisms in the processing of emotional face expression during memory formation. Functional brain imaging data was acquired during incidental learning of positive ("happy"), neutral and negative ("angry" or "fearful") faces. Dynamic Causal Modeling (DCM) was applied on the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data to characterize effective connectivity within a brain network involving face perception (inferior occipital gyrus and fusiform gyrus) and successful memory formation related areas (hippocampus, superior parietal lobule, amygdala, and orbitofrontal cortex). The bottom-up models assumed processing of emotional face expression along feed forward pathways to the orbitofrontal cortex. The top-down models assum

SUBMITTER: Xiu D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4407577 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature