Medial prefrontal and occipito-temporal activity at encoding determines enhanced recognition of threatening faces after 1.5 years

Abstract

Studies demonstrated that faces with threatening emotional expressions are better remembered than non-threatening faces. However, whether this memory advantage persists over years and which neural systems underlie such an effect remains unknown. Here, we employed an individual difference approach to examine whether the neural activity during incidental encoding was associated with differential recognition of faces with emotional expressions (angry, fearful, happy, sad and neutral) after a retention interval of > 1.5 years (N = 89). Behaviorally, we found a better recognition for threatening (angry, fearful) versus non-threatening (happy and neutral) faces after a > 1.5 years delay, which was driven by forgetting of non-threatening faces compared with immediate recognition after encoding. Multivariate principal component analysis (PCA) on the behavioral responses further con rmed the discriminative recognition performance between threatening and non-threatening faces. A voxel-wise whole-brain analysis on the concomitantly acquired functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) data during incidental encoding revealed that neural activity in bilateral inferior occipital gyrus (IOG) and ventromedial prefrontal/orbitofrontal cortex (vmPFC/OFC) was associated with the individual differences in the discriminative emotional face recognition performance measured by an innovative behavioral pattern similarity analysis (BPSA) based on inter-subject correlation (ISC). The left fusiform face area (FFA) was additionally determined using a regionally focused analysis. Overall, the present study provides evidence that threatening facial expressions lead to persistent face recognition over periods of > 1.5 years and differential encodingrelated activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and occipito-temporal cortex may underlie this effect.

The right inferior frontal gyrus as pivotal node and effective regulator of the basal ganglia-thalamocortical response inhibition circuit

“…In this study, n = 250 healthy right-handed participants were enrolled and underwent a validated Go/NoGo fMRI paradigm. The data have been previously used to examine undirected functional connectivity within domain-general and emotion-specific inhibitory brain systems (Zhuang et al ., 2021 ), and were part of a larger neuroimaging project examining pain empathy (Li et al ., 2019 ; Zhou et al ., 2020 ), emotional face memory (Liu et al ., 2022 ), and mirror neuron processing (Xu et al ., 2022 ). After quality assessment during the processes of data collection and preprocessing n = 218 participants were included (104 males, details see Supplementary Materials ).…”

The right inferior frontal gyrus as pivotal node and effective regulator of the basal ganglia-thalamocortical response inhibition circuit

“…N=250 healthy right-handed participants were enrolled in the current study and underwent a validated Go/NoGo fMRI paradigm. The data has been previously used to examine undirected functional connectivity within domain-general and emotion-specific inhibitory brain systems (Zhuang et al, 2021) and was part of larger neuroimaging project examining pain empathy (Li et al, 2018; Zhou et al, 2020), emotional face memory (Liu et al, 2022) and mirror neuron processing (Xu et al, 2022). After quality assessment n=218 subjects were included (104 males, Supplementary Materials ).…”