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Project

Individual variability in functional human brain organization

No two humans are alike. Since our personality, behaviour and cognitive skills are governed by the brain, one would be equally hard-pressed to find two human brains that are completely identical. Yet virtually every functional neuroimaging study aggregates brain scans across all participants in their sample. While this approach yields an easily interpretable map of brain regions commonly activated by the mental process(es) of interest, it comes with the cost of ignoring potentially meaningful interindividual differences in brain organization. Breaking the mold, the project we propose will instead focus precisely on how brain systems vary between people. We will gather functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, which measures task-related brain activity, in a large group of volunteers (N = 155) for six core cognitive abilities: producing speech, using tools, reading, guiding visual attention in space, recognizing faces and deriving emotion from speech intonation. For each of these cognitive functions, we will partition the participant sample into subgroups with similar brain activity patterns by applying a machine learning classifier to the fMRI data. Moreover, the putative behavioural relevance of this variability in brain organization will be investigated by comparing task-specific performance measures between the subgroups returned by the classifier. This project will fill an important gap in cognitive neuroscience, could serve as a benchmark against which (atypical) variability in clinical populations can be compared, and would advance research on neurodiversity.

Date:1 Oct 2021 →  30 Sep 2023
Keywords:Neurodiversity, variability in neurocognition
Disciplines:Neuropsychology, Neuroimaging, Cognitive processes, Cognitive neuroscience