Horowitz-Kraus Tzipi, Eaton Kenneth, Farah Rola, Hajinazarian Ardag, Vannest Jennifer, Holland Scott K
Pediatric Neuroimaging Research Consortium, Reading and Literacy Discovery Center, Cincinnati Children׳s Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH, United States; The Neurocognitive Center for Literacy, Language and Reading Development, Faulty of Education in Sciences and Technology, The Technion, Haifa, Israel.
Pediatric Neuroimaging Research Consortium, Reading and Literacy Discovery Center, Cincinnati Children׳s Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH, United States.
Brain Res. 2015 Dec 10;1629:54-62. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2015.10.008. Epub 2015 Oct 13.
To investigate whether high performance on college preparedness tests at 18 years of age can be predicted from brain activation patterns during narrative comprehension at 5-7 years of age.
In this longitudinal study, functional MRI data during an auditory narrative-comprehension task were acquired from 15 children (5-7 years of age) who also provided their American College Testing (ACT) scores at the age of 18 years. Active voxels during the narrative-comprehension task were correlated with both composite ACT scores and the reading-comprehension component of the exam.
Higher composite ACT scores and behavioral scores for reading comprehension were positively correlated with greater activation in frontal and anterior brain regions during the narrative-comprehension task.
Our results suggest that neural circuits supporting higher ACT performance are predictable from a narrative-comprehension task at the age of 5-7 years. This supports a critical role for the anterior cingulate cortex, which is a part of the cingulo-opercular cognitive-control network early in development, as a facilitator for better ACT scores. This study highlights that shared neural circuits that support overall ACT performance and neural circuits that support reading comprehension both rely on neural circuits related to narrative comprehension in childhood, suggesting that interventions involving narrative comprehension should be considered for individuals with reading and other academic difficulties.
探讨能否根据5至7岁儿童在叙事理解过程中的大脑激活模式，预测其18岁时大学入学准备测试的优异表现。
在这项纵向研究中，从15名5至7岁的儿童身上获取了听觉叙事理解任务期间的功能磁共振成像数据，这些儿童还提供了他们18岁时的美国大学考试（ACT）成绩。叙事理解任务期间的活跃体素与ACT综合成绩和考试的阅读理解部分进行了关联分析。
在叙事理解任务期间，较高的ACT综合成绩和阅读理解行为得分与额叶和前脑区域更强的激活呈正相关。
我们的结果表明，支持ACT更高表现的神经回路在5至7岁时的叙事理解任务中是可预测的。这支持了前扣带回皮质的关键作用，它在发育早期是扣带-脑岛认知控制网络的一部分，是提高ACT成绩的促进因素。这项研究强调，支持ACT整体表现的共享神经回路和支持阅读理解的神经回路都依赖于儿童期与叙事理解相关的神经回路，这表明对于有阅读和其他学业困难的个体，应考虑涉及叙事理解的干预措施。
