| Cognitive flexibility critically relies on the orbitofrontal cortex.Dysregulations in these domains and orbitofrontal activation have been reported in major psychiatric disorders.Haemodynamic brain imaging informed neurofeedback allows regional-specific control over brain activation and thus may represent an innovative intervention to regulate orbitofrontal dysfunctions.Recently there have been several neurofeedback studies in which participants were trained to regulate regional-specific regulate brain activation and showed promising treatment effects after training.Against this background the present proof-of-concept study evaluated the feasibility and behavioral relevance of functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy(fNIRS)assisted neurofeedback training of the lateral orbitofrontal cortex(lOFC).In a randomized sham-controlled between-subject design,60 male healthy participants underwent four subsequent runs of training to enhance lOFC activation.Participants were randomly assigned(30 participants in each group)to receive either real-time feedback from the OFC target region(real-time OFC neurofeedback group)or a sham feedback(sham neurofeedback group)during the training.In this study,we found that the participants in experimental group gained the ability to up-regulate their brain activity in the lOFC.Feedback from the target channel significantly increased regional-specific lOFC activation over the four training runs in comparison with sham feedback.In the cognitive flexibility tests after training,the experimental group demonstrated a trend for faster responses during set shifting relative to the sham group.The present results demonstrated that fNIRS-informed neurofeedback allows regional-specific regulation of lOFC activation and may have the potential to modulate associated behavioral domains.As such fNIRS-informed neurofeedback may represent a promising strategy to regulate OFC dysfunctions in psychiatric disorders.Finally,in this thesis as we only focused on healthy participants,the above results needs to be further validated by clinical studies in the future. |
