Abstract
Past research has shown that the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortices (dlPFC) are implicated in both emotional processing as well as cognitive processing,1,2,3 in addition to working memory4, 5. Exactly how these disparate processes interact with one another within the dlPFC is less understood. To explore this, researchers designed an experiment that looked at working memory performance during fMRI under both emotional and non-emotional task conditions. Participants were asked to complete three tasks (letters, neutral images, emotional images) of the Sternberg Sorting Task under one of two trial conditions (sort or maintain). Regions of interest consisted of the left and right dlPFC as defined by brain masks based on NeuroSynth6. Results showed a significant main effect of the ‘sort’ condition on reaction speed for all three trial types, as well as a main effect of task type (letters) on accuracy. In addition, a significant interaction was found between trial type (sort) and task type (letters), but not for either of the picture tasks. These results reveal a discrepancy between BOLD signal and behavioral data, with no significant difference in BOLD activity during image trials being displayed, despite longer response times for every condition. While these results show that the dlPFC is clearly implicated in non-emotional cognitive processing, more research is needed to explain the lack of BOLD activation seen here for similar emotionally valanced tasks, possibly indicating involvement of other brain networks.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Funding Statement
This project was supported in part by 2 NARSAD Young Investigator Grants from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (NLB: 2018, 2021); and by a K01 award K01MH121777 (NLB). The authors report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.
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All participants signed an informed consent form, and the protocol was approved by the Institutional Review Board for human subject research at the University of Pennsylvania. The authors assert that all procedures contributing to this work comply with the ethical standards of the relevant national and institutional committees on human experimentation and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008.
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Data Availability
All data produced in the present study are available upon reasonable request to the authors