Fig. 2. Inter-area correlation reveals enhanced interactions with amygdala when viewing fearful facial expressions.
a fMRI time series from V1 (top) and the amygdala (bottom) from a single run from an example participant in the 7T BOLD experiment, consisting of three 18 s blocks of trials of each facial expression (pink: fearful; blue: happy; gray: neutral) with interleaved blocks of fixation of 9 s. Three time series are plotted: green, measured time series; orange, mean stimulus-evoked response (estimated using deconvolution); purple, residual time series after removing the mean stimulus-evoked response. Horizontal black bars indicate the epoch of residual time series that was extracted for correlation analysis. b Correlation coefficients for fearful facial expression condition (left), neutral facial expression condition (middle), and the difference in correlation (fearful − neutral), indicating the negative valence effect (right). Each square in “pink” colormap indicates the correlation between residual time series for a pair of ROIs under fearful facial expression condition (left) or neutral facial expression condition (middle). Each square in “hot” colormap indicates the difference in correlation between fearful and neutral conditions for a pair of ROIs (right). c Correlation coefficients for happy facial expression condition (left), neutral facial expression condition (middle), and the difference in correlation (happy - neutral), indicating the positive valence effect (right). Each square in “pink” colormap indicates the correlation between residual time series for a pair of ROIs under happy facial expression condition (left) or neutral facial expression condition (middle). Each square in “hot” colormap indicates the difference in correlation between happy and neutral conditions for a pair of ROIs (right). b, c (left-middle), All squares in the fearful, happy, and neutral conditions showed correlation values significantly above 0 (P < 0.05, Wilcoxon signed rank test, Bonferroni-corrected for number of ROIs). b, c (right), Asterisks represent ROI pairs showing a statistically significant difference in correlation (*P < 0.05, One-sample t test, two-tailed, Bonferroni-corrected for number of ROIs). Number of unique participants scanned at 3T BOLD and 7T BOLD who were also scanned in the face localizer experiment: n = 15 (see Table 1). Source data are provided as a Source Data file.
