Xu M, De Beuckelaer A, Wang X, Liu L, Song Y, Liu J
State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning & IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China; Center for Collaboration and Innovation in Brain and Learning Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
Department of Personnel Management and Work and Organizational Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium; Institute for Management Research, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Neuroscience. 2015 Jul 9;298:318-28. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2015.04.025. Epub 2015 Apr 18.
Individuals' reading skills are critical for their educational development, but variation in reading skills is known to be large. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the role of spontaneous brain activity at rest in individual differences in reading skills in a large sample of participants (N=263). Specifically, we correlated individuals' word-reading skill with their fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (fALFF) of the whole brain at rest and found that the fALFFs of both the bilateral precentral gyrus (PCG) and superior temporal plane (STP) were positively associated with reading skills. The fALFF-reading association observed in these two regions remained after controlling for general cognitive abilities and in-scanner head motion. A cross-validation confirmed that the individual differences in word-reading skills were reliably correlated with the fALFF values of the bilateral PCG and STP. A follow-up task-based fMRI experiment revealed that the reading-related regions overlapped with regions showing a higher response to sentences than to pseudo-sentences (strings of pseudo-words), suggesting the resting-state brain activity partly captures the characteristics of task-based brain activity. In short, our study provides one of the first pieces of evidence that links spontaneous brain activity to reading behavior and offers an easy-to-access neural marker for evaluating reading skill.
个体的阅读技能对其教育发展至关重要，但已知阅读技能的差异很大。本研究使用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）来检验静息状态下的自发脑活动在大量参与者样本（N = 263）阅读技能个体差异中的作用。具体而言，我们将个体的单词阅读技能与其静息状态下全脑的低频波动分数振幅（fALFF）进行关联，发现双侧中央前回（PCG）和颞上平面（STP）的fALFF均与阅读技能呈正相关。在控制了一般认知能力和扫描过程中的头部运动后，在这两个区域观察到的fALFF与阅读之间的关联依然存在。交叉验证证实，单词阅读技能的个体差异与双侧PCG和STP的fALFF值可靠相关。一项后续基于任务的fMRI实验表明，与阅读相关的区域与对句子比对伪句子（伪词串）反应更高的区域重叠，这表明静息状态下的脑活动部分捕捉到了基于任务的脑活动特征。简而言之，我们的研究提供了首批将自发脑活动与阅读行为联系起来的证据之一，并为评估阅读技能提供了一个易于获取的神经标记。
