Department of Neurology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
Max Planck School of Cognition, Stephanstrasse 1A, Leipzig, Germany.
Commun Biol. 2024 Nov 12;7(1):1498. doi: 10.1038/s42003-024-07061-0.
Human cognition supports complex behaviour across a range of situations, and traits (e.g. personality) influence how we react in these different contexts. Although viewing traits as situationally grounded is common in social sciences, often studies attempting to link brain activity to human traits examine brain-trait associations in a single task, or, under passive conditions like wakeful rest. These studies, often referred to as brain wide association studies (BWAS) have recently become the subject of controversy because results are often unreliable even with large sample sizes. Although there are important statistical reasons why BWAS yield inconsistent results, we hypothesised that the situation in which brain activity is measured will impact the power in detecting a reliable link to specific traits. We performed a state-space analysis where tasks from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) were organized into a low-dimensional space based on how they activated different large-scale neural systems. We examined how individuals' observed brain activity across these different contexts related to their personality. We found that for multiple personality traits, stronger associations with brain activity emerge in some tasks than others. These data highlight the importance of context-bound views for understanding how brain activity links to trait variation in human behaviour.
人类认知在各种情况下支持复杂行为，而特质（例如个性）影响我们在这些不同情境中的反应方式。尽管在社会科学中，将特质视为情境基础是很常见的，但通常试图将大脑活动与人类特质联系起来的研究在单一任务中或在清醒休息等被动条件下检查大脑-特质关联。这些研究通常被称为全脑关联研究 (BWAS)，最近因为即使使用大样本量，结果也往往不可靠而成为争议的主题。尽管 BWAS 产生不一致结果有重要的统计原因，但我们假设测量大脑活动的情况将影响检测与特定特质可靠联系的能力。我们进行了状态空间分析，根据不同的大尺度神经系统激活方式，将人类连接组计划 (HCP) 的任务组织成一个低维空间。我们研究了个体在这些不同情境中的观察到的大脑活动如何与其个性相关。我们发现，对于多种个性特质，与大脑活动的关联在某些任务中比其他任务更强。这些数据强调了对于理解大脑活动如何与人的行为特质变化相关联，情境化观点的重要性。
