PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Yu Zhang
AU  - Kevin Larcher
AU  - Bratislav Misic
AU  - Alain Dagher
TI  - Anatomical and functional organization of the human substantia nigra and its connections
AID  - 10.1101/120857
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 120857
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/03/26/120857.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/03/26/120857.full
AB  - We investigated the anatomical and functional organization of the human substantia nigra (SN) using diffusion and functional MRI data from the Human Connectome Project. We identified a tripartite connectivity-based parcellation of SN with a limbic, cognitive and motor arrangement. The medial SN connects with limbic striatal and cortical regions and encodes value (greater response to monetary wins than losses during fMRI), while the ventral SN connects with associative regions of cortex and striatum and encodes salience (equal response to wins and losses). The lateral SN connects with somatomotor regions of striatum and cortex and also encodes salience. Connectivity within the value-coding medial SN network was associated with a measure of decisional impulsivity, while the salience-coding ventral SN network was associated with motor impulsivity. In sum, there is anatomical and functional heterogeneity of human SN, and separate SN networks underpin value versus salience coding, and impulsive choice versus impulsive action.