GoKawiilStudying cognition by averaging data from many people’s brain scans hides how individuals use their brains, new Stanford Medicine research has shown.
In particular, children who struggle with goal-oriented tasks show distinct patterns of brain activity when their data is analyzed individually, rather than as part of a group of kids with mixed abilities. The findings, which have implications for understanding how the brain works in such conditions as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, will be published April 27 in Nature Communications.
“Investigating how dynamics unfold within individual brains can provide significant insights into the neuroscience of individual differences and help us tackle questions that cannot be answered using conventional approaches,” said Percy Mistry, PhD, a research scholar in psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and a lead author of the study.
Mistry shares lead authorship with Nicholas Branigan, MS, a research data analyst in psychiatry and behavioral sciences. The senior author is Vinod Menon, PhD, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and the Rachael L. and Walter F. Nichols, MD, Professor.
The research evaluated inhibitory cognitive control — the process by which the brain suppresses distracting or irrelevant information while someone completes a task — in more than 4,000 children. The researchers compared results obtained by averaging brain-scan data of children against results obtained by analyzing the temporal dynamics in each child as they performed repetitions of the same task.
“Our study provides theoretical support for a growing movement toward personalization in human neuroscience, psychology and psychiatry,” Branigan said.
Nicholas Branigan, Vinod Menon and Percy Mistry
This approach was also able to identify subgroups of children with different levels of cognitive control and performance monitoring, or the ability to modify one’s strategy after making an error.
For example, children with good cognitive control and performance monitoring and those with poor cognitive control and performance monitoring showed quite different — and often opposite — brain dynamics.
Noting that studies connecting behavior to brain activity typically draw their conclusions from averaging groups’ data, Menon said, “Our study clearly shows that group averages can fundamentally mislead us about how the brain dynamically regulates behavior.”
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