Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital.
J Cogn Neurosci. 1996 Winter;8(1):78-82. doi: 10.1162/jocn.1996.8.1.78.
Sixteen subjects closed their eyes and visualized uppercase letters of the alphabet at two sizes, as small as possible or as large as possible while remaining "visible." Subjects evaluated a shape characteristic of each letter (e.g., whether it has any curved lines), and responded as quickly as possible. Cerebral blood flow was normalized to the same value for each subject, and relative blood flow was computed for a set of regions of interest. The mean response time for each subject in the task was regressed onto the blood flow values. Blood flow in area 17 was negatively correlated with response time (r = -0.65), as was blood flow in area 19 (r = -0.66), whereas blood flow in the inferior parietal lobe was positively correlated with response time (r = 0.54). The first two effects persisted even when variance due to the other correlations was removed. These findings suggest that individual differences in the activation of specific brain loci are directly related to performance of tasks that rely on processing in those loci.
16 名被试者闭上眼睛，想象两种大小的大写字母，尽可能小或尽可能大，同时保持“可见”。被试者评估每个字母的形状特征（例如，它是否有任何曲线），并尽快做出反应。为每个被试者的脑血流都归一化为相同的值，并计算了一组感兴趣区域的相对血流。任务中每个被试者的平均反应时间被回归到血流值上。区域 17 的血流与反应时间呈负相关（r = -0.65），区域 19 的血流也是如此（r = -0.66），而顶下小叶的血流与反应时间呈正相关（r = 0.54）。即使消除了其他相关性的方差，前两个效应仍然存在。这些发现表明，特定脑区激活的个体差异与依赖于这些脑区处理的任务表现直接相关。
