Altered structural and functional brain network overall organization predict human intertemporal decision‐making

Abstract

Intertemporal decision‐making is naturally ubiquitous to us: individuals always make a decision with different consequences occurring at different moments. These choices are invariably involved in life‐changing outcomes regarding marriage, education, fertility, long‐term well‐being, and even public policy. Previous studies have clearly uncovered the neurobiological mechanism of the intertemporal decision in the schemes of regional location or sub‐network. However, it still remains unclear how to characterize intertemporal behavior with multimodal whole‐brain network metrics to date. Here, we combined diffusion tensor image and resting‐state functional connectivity MRI technology, in conjunction with graph‐theoretical analysis, to explore the link between topological properties of integrated structural and functional whole‐brain networks and intertemporal decision‐making. Graph‐theoretical analysis illustrated that the participants with steep discounting rates exhibited the decreased global topological organizations including small‐world and rich‐club regimes in both functional and structural connectivity networks, and reflected the dreadful local topological dynamics in the modularity of functional connectome. Furthermore, in the cross‐modalities configuration, the same relationship was predominantly observed for the coupling of structural–functional connectivity as well. Above topological metrics are commonly indicative of the communication pattern of simultaneous global and local parallel information processing, and it thus reshapes our accounts on intertemporal decision‐making from functional regional/sub‐network scheme to multimodal brain overall organization.

Brain Structural Connectivity Predicts Brain Functional Complexity: Diffusion Tensor Imaging Derived Centrality Accounts for Variance in Fractal Properties of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Signal

“…Furthermore, resting state fMRI studies have revealed interesting baseline patterns of activation (i.e., resting state networks), and ushered in an age of network science in brain research. With the rise in resting state fMRI research, predicting resting state fMRI functional connectivity from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) structural connectivity has been an important recent endeavor for researchers, and the use of graph theory analyses of structural networks have been integral to these investigations (e.g., Honey, Thivierge, & Sporns, 2010;Goñi et al, 2014;Bettinardi et al, 2017;Zhang et al, 2019;Chen, Hu, Chen, & Feng , 2019). Furthermore, there has been recent interest in predicting taskbased fMRI activation from DTI structural connectivity (Osher et al, 2016;.…”

The structure dilemma in biological and artificial neural networks

“…These results are understandable since the neural structure of C. elegans was not optimised to solve the MNIST problem. Neurobiological research postulated that a specialized structure is always coupled with a certain function 2 , 3 . However, the structure needs to be changed only slightly so that it can solve this synthetic task more effectively, as evident in comparison with the C. elegans G ( n , p ) reference variant (not significant cases are shown in Table 4 ).…”

“…Going far beyond the obvious macroscopic structure of the brain, which hardly differs between human individuals, various authors postulated a coupling of structure and function 1 – 3 . Neurons, hubs, or in graph theory called nodes, with similar connection patterns often show similar functionality 4 , 5 .…”

Changes of Altruistic Behavior and Kynurenine Pathway in Late-Life Depression

“…The human brain serves as a highly complex and integrated network system. The graphtheoretical analysis of this complex network has resulted in a potent mathematical tool to quantify the collection of the comprehensive topological dynamics in these human structural connectomes (27). Considering the light of corresponding relationship between the function and structure of our brain (26), the structural foundation of the altruism changes that occur in older people is another question we want to investigate.…”