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Published February 16, 2016 | Supplemental Material + Published
Journal Article Open

Regional specialization within the human striatum for diverse psychological functions

Abstract

Decades of animal and human neuroimaging research have identified distinct, but overlapping, striatal zones, which are interconnected with separable corticostriatal circuits, and are crucial for the organization of functional systems. Despite continuous efforts to subdivide the human striatum based on anatomical and resting-state functional connectivity, characterizing the different psychological processes related to each zone remains a work in progress. Using an unbiased, data-driven approach, we analyzed large-scale coactivation data from 5,809 human imaging studies. We (i) identified five distinct striatal zones that exhibited discrete patterns of coactivation with cortical brain regions across distinct psychological processes and (ii) identified the different psychological processes associated with each zone. We found that the reported pattern of cortical activation reliably predicted which striatal zone was most strongly activated. Critically, activation in each functional zone could be associated with distinct psychological processes directly, rather than inferred indirectly from psychological functions attributed to associated cortices. Consistent with well-established findings, we found an association of the ventral striatum (VS) with reward processing. Confirming less well-established findings, the VS and adjacent anterior caudate were associated with evaluating the value of rewards and actions, respectively. Furthermore, our results confirmed a sometimes overlooked specialization of the posterior caudate nucleus for executive functions, often considered the exclusive domain of frontoparietal cortical circuits. Our findings provide a precise functional map of regional specialization within the human striatum, both in terms of the differential cortical regions and psychological functions associated with each striatal zone.

Additional Information

© 2016 National Academy of Sciences. Freely available online through the PNAS open access option. Edited by Marcus E. Raichle, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, and approved January 8, 2016 (received for review April 18, 2015). Published online before print February 1, 2016. We thank Jane E. Barker for helpful comments on the manuscript. This study was supported by Office of Naval Research Grants N00014-07-1-0651 and N00014-03-1-0428 (to R.C.O.), NIH Grants R01MH076136 and R01DA035484 (to T.D.W.), NIH Grants MH069597 and MH079485 (to R.C.O.), and NIH Grant R01MH096906 (to T.Y.). Author contributions: W.M.P., R.C.O., T.Y., and T.D.W. designed research; W.M.P. performed research; W.M.P. and T.D.W. analyzed data; and W.M.P., R.C.O., and T.D.W. wrote the paper. The authors declare no conflict of interest. This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1507610113/-/DCSupplemental.

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Published - PNAS-2016-Pauli-1907-12.pdf

Supplemental Material - pnas.1507610113.sapp.pdf

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