Abstract
The magnetoencephalography (MEG) signal was recorded while subjects watched a video containing separate blocks of affective and cognitive advertisements and recalled slides extracted from the video a day later. An earlier behavioural study using the same video material showed that the affective advertisements were better recalled and that administration of propranolol (a beta-adrenergic blocker) abolished this effect. Magnetic field tomography (MFT) was used to extract tomographic estimates of activity millisecond by millisecond from the continuous MEG signal. Statistically significant differences between affective and cognitive blocks were identified in posterior and prefrontal areas. Cognitive blocks produced stronger activity in posterior parietal areas and superior prefrontal cortex in all three subjects. Affective blocks modulated activity in orbitofrontal and retrosplenial cortex, amygdala and brainstem. Individual contributions to the statistical maps were traced in real time from milliseconds to many seconds. Time-locked responses from the recall session were used to compare average and single trial MFT solutions and to combine activations from all subjects into a common anatomical space. The last step produced statistically significant increases in occipital and inferior ventral cortex between 100 and 200 ms compared to a prestimulus baseline.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adolphs, A., Damasio, H., Tranel, D. and Damasio, A. Cortical systems for the recognition of emotion in facial expressions. J. Neurosci., 1996, 6: 7678-7687.
Ambler, T. and Burne, T. The impact of affect on memory of advertising. J. Advertising Research, 1999, 39(2): 25-34.
Anderson, S.W., Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Tranel, D. and Damasio, A.R. Impairment of social and moral behavior related to early damage in human prefrontal cortex. Nature Neuroscience, 1999, 2: 1032-1036.
Cahill, L., Haier, R.J., Fallon, J., Alkire, M.T., Tang, C., Keator, D., Wu, J. and McGaugh, L. Amygdala activity at encoding correlated with long-term free recall of emotional information. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 1996, 93: 8016-8021.
Cahill, L. and McGaugh, L. Mechanisms of emotional arousal and lasting declarative memory. TINS, 1998, 21: 294-299.
Carpenter, A.F., Georgopoulos, A.P. and Pellizzer, G. Motor cortical encoding of serial order in a context-recall task. Science, 1999, 283: 1752-1757.
Cipolloni, P.B. and Pandya, D.N. Cortical connections of the frontoparietal opercular areas in the rhesus monkey. J. Comp. Neurol., 1999, 403: 431-458.
Damasio, A.R. Descartes's Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, Grosset and Putnam, New York, 1994.
Drevets, W.C., Price, J.L., Simpson. J.R. Jr, Toodd, R.D., Reich, T., Vannier, M. and Raichle, M.E. Subgenual prefrontal cortex abnormalities in mood disorders. Nature, 1997, 386: 824-827.
Gray, J.M., Young, A.W., Barker, W.A., Curtis, A. and Gibson, D. Impaired recognition of disgust in Huntington's disease gene carriers. Brain, 1997, 120: 2018-2029.
Halgren, E., Walter, R.D., Cherlow, D.G. and Crandall, P.H. Mental phenomena evoked by electrical stimulation of the human hippocampal formation and amygdala. Brain, 1978, 101: 83-117.
Hamann, S.B., Ely, T.D., Grafton, S.T. and Kilts, C.D. Amygdala activity related to enhanced memory. Nature Neuroscience, 1999, 2: 1032-1036.
Hämäläinen, M., Hari, R., IImoniemi, R.J., Knuutila, J. and Lounasmaa, O.V. Magnetoencephalography — theory, instrumentation and applications to non-invasive studies of the working human brain. Reviews of Modern Physics, 1993, 65: 413-497.
Ioannides, A.A., Bolton, J.P.R. and Clarke, C.J.S. Continuous probabilistic solutions to the biomagnetic inverse problem. Inverse Problem, 1990, 6: 523-542.
Ioannides, A.A. Estimates brain activity using magnetic field tomography and large scale communication within the brain. In: M.W. Ho, F.A. Popp and U. Warnke (Eds.), Bioelectrodynamics and Biocommunication, World Scientific, Singapore, 1994: 319-353.
Ioannides, A.A., Liu, M.J., Liu, L.C., Bamidis, P.D., Hellstrand, E. and Stephan, K.M. Magnetic field tomography of cortical and deep processes: examples of “real-time mapping” of averaged and single trial MEG signals. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 1995, 20(2): 161-175.
Jahn, O., Cichocki, A., Ioannides, A.A. and Amari, S. Identification and elimination of artefacts from MEG signals using extended independent component analysis. In: T. Yoshimoto, M. Kotani, S. Kuriki, H. Karibe and N. Nakasato (Eds.), Recent Advances in Biomagnetism, Tohoku University Press, Sendai, 1999: 224-228.
LeDoux, J.E. The Emotional Brain, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1996.
Liu, L.C. and Ioannides, A.A. A correlation study of averaged and single trial MEG signals: the average describes multiple histories each in a different set of single trials. Brain Topography, 1996, 8(4): 385-396.
Liu, L.C., Ioannides, A.A. and Müller-Gärtner, H.W. Bi-hemispheric study of single trial MEG signals of the human auditory cortex. Electroenceph. clin. Neurophysiol., 1998, 106: 64-78.
Liu, L.C., Ioannides, A.A. and Streit, M. Single trial analysis of neurophysiological correlates of the recognition of complex objects and facial expressions of emotion. Brain Topography, 1999, 11: 291-303.
Maddock, R.J. The retrosplenial cortex and emotion: new insights from functional neuroimaging of the human brain. TINS, 1999, 22: 310-316.
Morris, R., Petrides, M. and Pandya, D.N. Architecture and connections of theretrosplenial area 30 in the rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta). Eur. J. Neurosci., 1999, 11: 2506-2518.
Philips, M.L, Young, A.W., Senior, C., Brammer, M., Andrew, C., Calder, A.J. et al. A specific neural substrate for perceiving facial expressions of disgust. Nature, 1997, 389: 495-498.
Rizzolatti, G. and Arbib, A. Language within our grasp. Trends Neurosc., 1998, 21: 188-194.
Rolls, E.T. The Brain and Emotion, Oxford University Press Inc., New York, 1999.
Sprengelmeyer, R., Young, A.W., Calder, A.J., Karnat, A., Lange, H., Homberg, V., Perrett, D.I. and Rowland, D. Perception of faces and emotions: loss of disgust in Huntington's disease. Brain, 1996, 119: 1647-1665.
Strupp, J. P. STIMULATE: a GUI based fMRI analysis software package. NeuroImage 3, S607, June 1996.
Taylor, J.G., Ioannides, A.A. and Müller-Gärtner, H.W. Mathematical analysis of lead field expansions. IEEE Trans. Med. Imag., 1999, 18: 151-163.
Turken, A.U. and Swick, D. Response selection in the human anterior cingulate cortex. Nature Neuroscience, 1999, 2: 920-924.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ioannides, A.A., Liu, L., Theofilou, D. et al. Real Time Processing of Affective and Cognitive Stimuli in the Human Brain Extracted from MEG Signals. Brain Topogr 13, 11–19 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007878001388
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007878001388