Behavioral profiling of the hippocampus in late childhood and adolescence

[plachti]

Behavioral profiling of the hippocampus in late childhood and adolescence

Research question(s)

Questions: Does the hippocampus have a specific behavioral profile?
Does the behavioral profile of the hippocampus resemble reported parcellation patterns (qualitative description)?
Are there any sex-differences?
Do the behavioral profiles of the left and right hippocampus differ (qualitative description)?

Description

The hippocampus is a heterogeneous brain region, which can be subdivided into subfields and subregions based on cytoarchitecture (Amunts et al. 2005), gene expression (Vos de Wael et al. 2018), connectivity patterns (Plachti et al. 2019, 2020) and function (Strange et al. 2014) along the medial-lateral and anterior-posterior axis. However, we know little about hippocampal behavioral profiles, especially at the stage of adolescence. Overall the anterior hippocampus is assumed to be involved in emotions, autobiographical memory, whereas the posterior hippocampus is assumed to be involved in navigation, visual perception. Unpublished work in children and adolescents indicates that subregions of the hippocampus are related to specific whole-brain structural covariance networks associated with specific behavior (emotions, motor, reward).
The stage of late childhood and adolescence, however, seems to represent a sensitive period of high plasticity, where such a mapping may reveal important structure(grey matter volume)-behavior patterns.

This exploratory project aims to uncover hippocampal behavioral profiles using UPPS-P Impulse Behavioral Scale, positive effect, and BIS/BAS questionnaires and structural (T1 -MRI). Here, I am very open to include other behavioral measures if you are interested in. I hypothesize that no sex differences will be detected in behavioral profiles of the hippocampus but slight differences in the profiles between left and right hippocampus, because previous literature indicated hippocampal asymmetries.

Tools and algorithms to be used

Algorithm: Partial least square correlations (PLSC) in R or Python
Python, nilearn

Skills we could use help with (optional)

Nilearn

Link to analysis plan (optional)

Suggested keywords/tags

structural MRI
hippocampus
behavioral profiling

[angielaird]

Excellent project idea, Anna! I'd love to join and contribute!

[mchoi3210]

Hi @plachti. Thank you so much for sharing the awesome idea! I'd love to join your team. Really hope that I can contribute. Could you share related papers so that I can quickly build some theoretical background? :)

[plachti]

Dear @mchoi3210 , that sounds great! I am happy to hear from you. Please find here the links to the papers that are theoretically connected:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811920306972, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1803667115, https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn3785.
Poster_OHBM_2021.pdf

[plachti]

@mchoi3210 what is your slack name? I would create a slack channel, where we can communicate. I would like to schedule an appointment for our meeting either today or tomorrow before project plan presentation.

[plachti]

@mchoi3210 I created a doodle for our first meeting to discuss briefly our roadmap of the project, which we hopefully will present tomorrow at 2pm ET timezone. The time slots are in european time CET (GMT+2). We do not have to meet for 1 h, 30 min may be enough, let’s see. Would be great to hear from you whether you have time and can participate 😃
https://doodle.com/meeting/participate/id/aKr1QqGe
We will meet on slack in the channel that I created: #behavioral_hippocampus. I will add you, let me know your slack name.

[mchoi3210]

Hi @plachti Thank you so much for sharing the papers! And I checked and finished the doodle and slack things. I am afraid that I am a kind of a newbie in neuroimaging field, but I will try my best to collaborate and contribute. Looking forward to meeting with you guys!