Large-scale intrinsic functional network organization along the long-axis of the human medial temporal lobe

摘要

The medial temporal lobe (MTL), encompassing the hippocampus and parahippocampal gyrus (PHG), is a heterogeneous structure which plays a critical role in memory and cognition. Here we investigate functional architecture of the human MTL along the long-axis of the hippocampus and PHG. The hippocampus showed stronger connectivity with ventral striatum, ventral tegmental area and amygdala — regions important for integrating reward and affective signals, whereas the PHG showed stronger connectivity with unimodal and polymodal association cortices. In the hippocampus, the anterior node showed stronger connectivity with the anterior medial temporal lobe and the posterior node showed stronger connectivity with widely-distributed cortical and subcortical regions including those involved in sensory and reward processing. In the PHG, differences were characterized by a gradient of increasing anterior to posterior node connectivity with core nodes of the default mode network. Left and right MTL connectivity patterns were remarkably similar, except for stronger left than right MTL connectivity within the hippocampus and PHG. Graph theoretical analysis of MTL-based networks revealed higher node centrality of the posterior, compared to anterior and middle hippocampus. The PHG showed prominent gradients in both node degree and centrality along its anterior to posterior axis. Our findings highlight several novel aspects of functional heterogeneity in connectivity along the long-axis of the human MTL and provide new insights into how its network organization supports integration and segregation of signals from distributed brain areas. The implications of our findings for a principled understanding of distributed pathways that support memory and cognition are discussed.