Delineating visual, auditory and motor regions in the human brain with functional neuroimaging: a BrainMap-based meta-analytic synthesis

Abstract

Most everyday behaviors and laboratory tasks rely on visual, auditory and/or motor-related processes. Yet, to date, there has been no large-scale quantitative synthesis of functional neuroimaging studies mapping the brain regions consistently recruited during such perceptuo-motor processing. We therefore performed three coordinate-based meta-analyses, sampling the results of neuroimaging experiments on visual (n = 114), auditory (n = 122), or motor-related (n = 251) processing, respectively, from the BrainMap database. Our analyses yielded both regions known to be recruited for basic perceptual or motor processes and additional regions in posterior frontal cortex. Comparing our results with data-driven network definitions based on resting-state functional connectivity revealed good overlap in expected regions but also showed that perceptual and motor task-related activations consistently involve additional frontal, cerebellar, and subcortical areas associated with “higher-order” cognitive functions, extending beyond what is captured when the brain is at “rest.” Our resulting sets of domain-typical brain regions can be used by the neuroimaging community as robust functional definitions or masks of regions of interest when investigating brain correlates of perceptual or motor processes and their interplay with other mental functions such as cognitive control or affective processing. The maps are made publicly available via the ANIMA database.

Deficits in rate of force production during multifinger tasks are associated with cognitive status

“…8 Areas of the brain and connecting white-matter tracts that regulate various facets of cognition and motor function overlap extensively. [53][54][55] Since they rely, at least in part, on common neural systems, the neurodegenerative processes that are a feature of ageing should have corresponding effects on cognitive function and the ability to recruit muscles precisely. It may therefore be instructive to examine the extent to which global cognition is related to measures of muscle coordination derived from tasks that share some of the demands imposed upon the CNS by multifinger dynamometry.…”

Structural Degeneration of the Nucleus basalis of Meynert in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer’s Disease – Evidence from an MRI-based Meta-Analysis

“…While this may be considered a limitation, the advantage is that BrainMap's database allows a fast and less error-prone search and data extraction (Müller et al, 2018). As such, it represents a powerful tool to provide robust and generalizable results (Heckner et al, 2021).…”

“…Additionally, in four studies (Bozzali et al, 2006;Hämäläinen et al, 2007;Rami et al, 2009;Shiino et al, 2006) the same HCs were contrasted against MCI and AD, respectively; here they were entered into both meta-analyses HC>MCI and HC>AD, respectively. However, study-specific biases are unlikely due to the number of included experiments (see Figure 1) (Heckner et al, 2021;Turkeltaub et al, 2012). MRI scanners included field strengths from 1.0 to 3.0 Tesla, for one study the field strength was unknown, and all incorporated studies performed a VBM whole brain analysis (Ashburner and Friston, 2000;Mechelli et al, 2005), typically with SPM, MedX or FSL.…”

“…Significant clusters and associated brain regions will be reported based on the probabilistic cytoarchitectonic human brain maps as implemented in the SPM Anatomy Toolbox Version 3.0 (Eickhoff et al, 2007(Eickhoff et al, , 2006(Eickhoff et al, , 2005Heckner et al, 2021) (available from https://www.fzjuelich.de/en/inm/inm-7/resources/jubrain-anatomy-toolbox).…”

Intracranial direct electrical mapping reveals the functional architecture of the human basal ganglia

“…In contrast to the traditional methods, the recently described automated online meta-analysis tool NeuroQuery predicts the most relevant brain regions by parsing the queries using supervised machine learning from a database derived from 13,459 full-text articles 27 . The brain map produced by NeuroQuery has been shown to predict the spatial distribution of findings well and thus provide a good basis to generate regions of interest or interpret results for studies of rarely examined terms 78 , 79 . To generate good prediction maps in NeuroQuery, we used combinations of the term “basal ganglia” and the term for specific categories of elicited responses (“sensorimotor”; “vestibular”; “autonomic”).…”