Visconti di Oleggio Castello Matteo, Dupré la Tour Tom, Gallant Jack L
Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley; Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
Department of Neuroscience, University of California, Berkeley; Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
bioRxiv. 2025 Aug 22:2025.08.22.671848. doi: 10.1101/2025.08.22.671848.
Each person experiences the world through a unique conceptual lens, shaped by personal experiences, natural variations, or disease. These individual differences have remained largely inaccessible to cognitive neuroscience and clinical neurology, limiting the development of precision medicine approaches to cognitive disorders. To overcome this limitation, here we develop a new statistical framework to measure and interpret individual differences in functional brain representations. We apply this framework to characterize how different individuals represent the same concepts. Twenty-four participants listened to narrative stories while their brain activity was measured with functional MRI (fMRI). Encoding models were used to recover how hundreds of concepts were represented in each person's brain. Despite listening to identical stories, participants showed systematic individual differences in conceptual representations. These differences reveal person-specific biases in how concepts are represented in the brain. Individual variability was highest in regions that represent social information. Because these regions are thought to integrate sensory information with personal beliefs and experiences, the observed individual differences may reflect cognitive traits unique to each person. Our work reveals that individual differences are a systematic, measurable principle of conceptual representations in the human brain. By enabling researchers to measure and interpret differences in person-specific functional brain representations, our work establishes a new paradigm for precision neuroscience. This paradigm provides a rigorous foundation for developing fMRI applications in precision medicine to diagnose and monitor cognitive disorders.
每个人都通过一个独特的概念透镜体验世界，这个透镜由个人经历、自然差异或疾病塑造。认知神经科学和临床神经学在很大程度上仍无法触及这些个体差异，这限制了针对认知障碍的精准医学方法的发展。为了克服这一限制，我们在此开发了一种新的统计框架，以测量和解释功能性脑表征中的个体差异。我们应用这个框架来描述不同个体如何表征相同的概念。24名参与者在听叙事故事的同时，通过功能磁共振成像（fMRI）测量他们的大脑活动。编码模型被用来恢复每个人大脑中数百个概念的表征方式。尽管听的是相同的故事，但参与者在概念表征上表现出系统性的个体差异。这些差异揭示了大脑中概念表征的个体特异性偏差。在表征社会信息的区域中，个体变异性最高。由于这些区域被认为会将感官信息与个人信念和经历整合起来，观察到的个体差异可能反映了每个人独特的认知特征。我们的研究表明，个体差异是人类大脑中概念表征的一个系统性、可测量的原则。通过使研究人员能够测量和解释个体特异性功能性脑表征的差异，我们的工作为精准神经科学建立了一个新的范式。这个范式为在精准医学中开发功能磁共振成像应用以诊断和监测认知障碍提供了一个严格的基础。
