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Poster C153 in Poster Session C - Friday, August 9, 2024, 11:15 am – 1:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Mapping Causal Brain Interactions in fMRI Decoded Neurofeedback
Fahimeh Arab1 (), AmirEmad Ghassami2, Megan Peters3, Erfan Nozari1; 1University of California Riverside, 2Boston University, 3University of California Irvine
Neurofeedback (NF), including its specialized form Decoded Neurofeedback (DecNef), holds great promise for improving mental health and cognitive function by allowing individuals to voluntarily control their brain activity. However, there exists vast subject-to-subject and region-to-region variability in neurofeedback outcomes and the causal mechanisms involved in successful neurofeedback are largely unknown. In this paper, we investigate the neural mechanisms behind this variability using whole-brain causal connectomes derived from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data from a DecNef study aimed at reducing common fears via subconscious induction of feared images. During NF, we found strongest causal connections among regions of the attention and somatomotor subnetworks. Additionally, the net strength of causal effects between most pairs of subnetworks was significantly correlated with mean NF score, though with different signs. Specifically, we found most connections among visual, subcortical, default mode, and dorsal attention subnetworks to support NF success, while most connections among ventral attention, somatomotor, limbic, and control subnetworks correlated negatively with NF scores.
Keywords: decoded neurofeedback causal discovery brain networks