Olson Halie A, Johnson Kristina T, Nishith Shruti, Frosch Isabelle R, Gabrieli John D E, D'Mello Anila M
McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
bioRxiv. 2024 Sep 5:2023.03.21.533695. doi: 10.1101/2023.03.21.533695.
Cognition is shaped by individual experiences and interests. However, to study cognition in the brain, researchers typically use generic stimuli that are the same across all individuals. Language, in particular, is animated and motivated by several highly personal factors that are typically not accounted for in neuroimaging study designs, such as "interest" in a topic. Due to its inherently personal and idiosyncratic nature, it is unknown how interest in a topic modulates language processing in the brain. We conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 20 children (ages 6.98-12.01 years, mean(SD)=9.35(1.52), 5 female/15 male) as they listened to personalized narratives about a topic of specific interest, as well as to non-personalized generic narratives. We found that personalized narratives about a topic of interest increased activation in canonical language areas, as well as in reward and self-reference regions. Strikingly, we found that activation patterns elicited by topics of personal interest were more consistent across children, despite their idiosyncratic nature, than activation patterns elicited by narratives about an identical generic topic. These results reinforce the critical role that personal interests play in language processing in the human brain, and demonstrate the feasibility of using a personalized neuroimaging approach to study the effects of individually-varying factors such as interest in the brain.
认知由个人经历和兴趣塑造。然而，为了研究大脑中的认知，研究人员通常使用对所有个体都相同的通用刺激。尤其是语言，它受到几个高度个性化因素的驱动和影响，而这些因素在神经影像学研究设计中通常未被考虑，比如对某个主题的“兴趣”。由于其固有的个人特质和独特性，尚不清楚对某个主题的兴趣如何调节大脑中的语言处理。我们对20名儿童（年龄在6.98 - 12.01岁之间，平均（标准差）= 9.35（1.52），5名女性/15名男性）进行了功能磁共振成像（fMRI），让他们听关于特定感兴趣主题的个性化叙述以及非个性化的通用叙述。我们发现，关于感兴趣主题的个性化叙述会增加经典语言区域以及奖赏和自我参照区域的激活。令人惊讶的是，我们发现，尽管个人感兴趣的主题具有独特性，但与关于相同通用主题的叙述所引发的激活模式相比，由个人感兴趣的主题所引发的激活模式在儿童之间更为一致。这些结果强化了个人兴趣在人类大脑语言处理中所起的关键作用，并证明了使用个性化神经影像学方法来研究诸如兴趣等个体差异因素在大脑中的影响的可行性。
