We're grateful to Dr. Marlene Cohen (Centre for Neural Basis of Cognition, University of Pittsburgh and CMU) and Dr. Laura Mikula (York University) for the informative discussions and their guidance.
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Each comparision contains analysis of three aspects:
- Contrasts in Parcels for both hemispheres
- Contrasts in network activations for both hemispheres
- Visualizing contrasts of activitations in parcels
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4 different comparisons
This is the nomenclature that we follow for response of participants and condition of videos:
- Case A. Mental and Random Classes of Videos
- Case B. Resp_M-M and Resp_R-R (Taking Resp_R-R Sate as Control)
- Case C. Resp_M-M and Resting State (Taking Resting Sate as Control)
- Case D. Resp_M-M and Resp_R-M
We performed correlation analysis to investigate the functional connectivity among the regions responsible for empathy. We investigated 36 parcels, consistent with the literature, belonging to the following four regions: Temporal-Parietal-Occipital Junction, Medial prefrontal cortex,Auditory Association, and Lateral Temporal cortex We arranged these parcels regions-wise in the correlation matrix.
As you can see in the figure (Rightmost), Temporal-parietal-occipital junction was found to be correlating well with both auditory association and Lateral temporal region, hinting that their functional connectivity leads to empathy.
(Middle Column) These are contrasts in the activations in the four regions, that were observed when subtraction analysis was performed on the basis of only the class of videos.
(Leftmost Column) There were also three other regions where we observed high activations, dedicated for cognition tasks other than empathy, and hence we excluded them from our analysis, namely : Inferior Frontal Cortex, which is responsible for Attention and Working Memory, Medial Temporal cortex, responsible for Spatial Memory and Long Term Memory, MT+ Complex & Neighbouring Visual Areas which are responsible for visual processing.