Fehr Thorsten, Code Chris, Herrmann Manfred
Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Neuropsychology/Behavioral Neurobiology, University of Bremen, Germany.
Neurosci Lett. 2008 Jan 24;431(1):39-44. doi: 10.1016/j.neulet.2007.11.016. Epub 2007 Nov 17.
Neuroimaging and lesion studies suggest that a network of different brain areas are involved in mental calculation processes. Indeed, little is known about the comparability of brain activation across studies because of the variety of different design parameters. The experiment reported in the present study examined response times and fMRI-BOLD activity patterns in normal volunteers for calculation tasks entailing addition, subtraction, multiplication and division tasks of different complexities from auditory stimulation. FMRI data showed activation patterns in bilateral superior frontal, adjacent to medial frontal regions, and in right precuneus as revealed by conjunction analysis. All other regional activations appeared to be operation-specific and distributed in predominantly right hemispheric frontal, parietal and central regions. It is concluded that both operation and task presentation modalities can have significant influence on the mobilization of regional neuronal networks required for mental calculation processes. Therefore, it is suggested that results from different studies should only be compared directly when analogous presentation modalities and operators were used in the applied experimental designs.
神经影像学和病灶研究表明，不同脑区组成的网络参与了心算过程。实际上，由于各种不同的设计参数，目前对于不同研究中大脑激活的可比性知之甚少。本研究报告的实验检测了正常志愿者在面对由听觉刺激引发的不同复杂程度的加法、减法、乘法和除法计算任务时的反应时间以及功能磁共振成像血氧水平依赖（fMRI-BOLD）活动模式。联合分析显示，功能磁共振成像数据表明双侧额上回（邻近额内侧区）和右侧楔前叶出现激活模式。所有其他区域激活似乎具有运算特异性，主要分布在右半球的额叶、顶叶和中央区。得出的结论是，运算和任务呈现方式都可能对心算过程所需的区域神经元网络调动产生重大影响。因此，建议只有在应用实验设计中使用了类似的呈现方式和运算符时，不同研究的结果才能直接进行比较。
