Division of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Institute of Development, Aging and Cancer, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan.
Division of Medical Neuroimaging Analysis, Department of Community Medical Supports, Tohoku Medical Megabank Organization, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan.
Sci Rep. 2017 Aug 30;7(1):10014. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-10104-8.
Correlations between regional gray matter volume (rGMV) and psychometric test scores have been measured to investigate the neural bases for individual differences in complex cognitive abilities (CCAs). However, such studies have yielded different rGMV correlates of the same CCA. Based on the available evidence, we hypothesized that diverse CCAs are all positively but only weakly associated with rGMV in widespread brain areas. To test this hypothesis, we used the data from a large sample of healthy young adults [776 males and 560 females; mean age: 20.8 years, standard deviation (SD) = 0.8] and investigated associations between rGMV and scores on multiple CCA tasks (including non-verbal reasoning, verbal working memory, Stroop interference, and complex processing speed tasks involving spatial cognition and reasoning). Better performance scores on all tasks except non-verbal reasoning were associated with greater rGMV across widespread brain areas. The effect sizes of individual associations were generally low, consistent with our previous studies. The lack of strong correlations between rGMV and specific CCAs, combined with stringent corrections for multiple comparisons, may lead to different and diverse findings in the field.
已有研究通过测量区域灰质体积（rGMV）与心理测量测试分数之间的相关性，来探究个体复杂认知能力（CCAs）差异的神经基础。然而，这些研究对于同一 CCA 的 rGMV 相关性却得出了不同的结果。基于现有证据，我们假设不同的 CCAs 与广泛脑区的 rGMV 均呈正相关，但相关性较弱。为了验证这一假设，我们使用了大量健康年轻成年人的数据（男性 776 名，女性 560 名；平均年龄：20.8 岁，标准差（SD）=0.8），并研究了 rGMV 与多项 CCA 任务得分之间的相关性（包括非言语推理、言语工作记忆、斯特鲁普干扰和涉及空间认知和推理的复杂处理速度任务）。除非言语推理任务外，所有任务的表现得分越高，与广泛脑区的 rGMV 越高。个别关联的效应大小普遍较低，与我们之前的研究一致。rGMV 与特定 CCAs 之间缺乏强相关性，再加上对多重比较的严格校正，可能会导致该领域出现不同和多样的发现。
