Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2022 Jun 2;34(7):1164-1182. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_01848.
Two major goals of human neuroscience are to understand how the brain functions in the real world and to measure neural processes under conditions that are ecologically valid. A critical step toward these goals is understanding how brain activity during naturalistic tasks that mimic the real world relates to brain activity in more traditional laboratory tasks. In this study, we used intersubject correlations to locate reliable stimulus-driven cerebral processes among children and adults in a naturalistic video lesson and a laboratory forced-choice task that shared the same arithmetic concept. We show that relative to a control condition with grammatical content, naturalistic and laboratory arithmetic tasks evoked overlapping activation within brain regions previously associated with math semantics. The regions of specific functional overlap between the naturalistic mathematics lesson and laboratory mathematics task included bilateral intraparietal cortex, which confirms that this region processes mathematical content independently of differences in task mode. These findings suggest that regions of the intraparietal cortex process mathematical content when children are learning about mathematics in a naturalistic setting.
人类神经科学的两个主要目标是理解大脑在真实世界中的功能，以及在具有生态效度的条件下测量神经过程。实现这些目标的关键步骤是了解在更传统的实验室任务中，模仿真实世界的自然主义任务期间的大脑活动与大脑活动之间的关系。在这项研究中，我们使用受试者间相关性在自然主义视频课程和具有相同算术概念的实验室强制选择任务中找到儿童和成人之间可靠的受刺激驱动的大脑过程。我们表明，与具有语法内容的对照条件相比，自然主义和实验室算术任务在先前与数学语义相关的大脑区域内引起了重叠的激活。自然主义数学课程和实验室数学任务之间特定功能重叠的区域包括双侧顶内沟，这证实了该区域独立于任务模式的差异来处理数学内容。这些发现表明，当儿童在自然主义环境中学习数学时，顶内皮层的区域会处理数学内容。
