Title
Amygdala habituation: A reliable fMRI phenotype.
Abstract
Amygdala function is of high interest for cognitive, social and psychiatric neuroscience, emphasizing the need for reliable assessments in humans. Previous work has indicated unsatisfactorily low within-subject reliability of amygdala activation fMRI measures. Based on basic science evidence for strong habituation of amygdala response to repeated stimuli, we investigated whether a quantification of habituation provides additional information beyond the usual estimate of the overall mean activity. We assessed the within-subject reliability of amygdala habituation measures during a facial emotion matching paradigm in 25 healthy subjects. We extracted the amygdala signal decrement across the course of the fMRI run for the two test–retest measurement sessions and compared reliability estimates with previous findings based on mean response amplitude. Retest-reliability of the session-wise amygdala habituation was significantly higher than the evoked amygdala mean amplitude (intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC)=0.53 vs. 0.16). To test the task-specificity of this finding, we compared the retest-reliability of amygdala habituation across two different tasks. Significant amygdala response decrement was also seen in a cognitive task (n-back working memory) that did not per se activate the amygdala, but was totally unreliable in that context (ICC~0.0), arguing for task-specificity. Together the results show that emotion-dependent amygdala habituation is a robust and considerably more reliable index than the mean amplitude, and provides a robust potential endpoint for within-subject designs including pharmaco-fMRI studies.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1016/j.neuroimage.2014.09.059
NeuroImage
Keywords
Field
DocType
Amygdala habituation,fMRI,Retest reliability,Intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC),Emotion,Faces
Basic science,Developmental psychology,Mean and predicted response,Working memory,Psychology,Cognitive psychology,Amygdala,Habituation,Stimulus (physiology),Cognition,Intraclass correlation
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
103
1053-8119
5
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.50
7
11
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Michael M Plichta11448.25
Oliver Grimm21005.22
Katrin Morgen350.50
Daniela Mier41105.92
Carina Sauer5954.41
Leila Haddad61105.45
Heike Tost7443.97
Christine Esslinger81105.45
Peter Kirsch9253.02
Adam J. Schwarz1016211.71
Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg1125318.54