The structural basis of inter-individual differences in human behaviour and cognition

By Ryota Kanai, Geraint E. Rees. 2011

1,092 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Inter-individual variability in perception, thought and action is frequently treated as a source of 'noise' in scientific investigations of the neural mechanisms that underlie these processes, and discarded by averaging data from a group of participants. However, recent MRI studies in the human brain show that inter-individual variability in a wide range of basic and higher cognitive functions — including perception, motor control, memory, aspects of consciousness and the ability to introspect — can be predicted from the local structure of grey and white matter as assessed by voxel-based morphometry or diffusion tensor imaging. We propose that inter-individual differences can be used as a source of information to link human behaviour and cognition to brain anatomy.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

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Citations in the corpus

Visual Feature Attribution Using Wasserstein GANs (2017, background): “Statistical analysis of medical images for identifying disease effects has been an instrumental tool for various diseases and disorders [56, 46, 9] as well as other nondisease related factors [17, 38, 28, 59, 42, 55].”
Models of the Aging Brain Structure and Individual Decline (2012, methodology): “Studies using VBM (Ashburner and Friston, 2000) have successfully addressed these inter-individual differences of adult brain structure and have given some insights into the complex relation to behavior and cognitive processing (Eckert, 2011; Kanai and Rees, 2011).”
The human connectome: Origins and challenges (2013, background): “A number of studies have shown that specific variations in structure are strongly associated with individual variations in sensory or motor processing (Kanai and Rees, 2011).”
Task-free MRI Predicts Individual Differences in Brain Activity During Task Performance (2016, neutral): “LANGUAGE Sentences, stories, mental arithmetic (auditory) [7] MATH [8] STORY [9] MATH-STORY”
Multisensory Stimulation in Stroke Rehabilitation (2012, background): “A wide range of basic and higher cognitive function, including perception, motor control, memory, and the ability to introspect, can be predicted from the local structure of gray and white matter as assessed by voxel-based morphometry or diffusion tensor imaging (Kanai and Rees, 2011).”
SubCMap: Subject and Condition Specific Effect Maps (2017, background): “[4, 5, 6], as well as genetics and inherited traits, e.”
The Cognitive Neuroscience of Metacognition (2014, background): “[91, 97] introduced a two-layer attractor network based on integrate-and-fire neurons that can accomplish this.”
The reliability paradox: Why robust cognitive tasks do not produce reliable individual differences (2017, background): “Recent reviews have highlighted the potential for individual differences approaches to advance our understanding of the relationship between brain structure and function (Kanai & Rees, 2011).”
Reconstructing subject‐specific effect maps (2017, neutral): “(Garrido et al., 1993; Miller and OCallaghan, 2003; Kanai and Rees, 2011), as well as genetics and inherited traits, e.”
The neural basis of metacognitive ability (2012, background): “Such findings are consistent with individual differences in localised brain structure affecting a region’s functional properties [97].”
Musical training as a framework for brain plasticity: behavior, function, and structure. (2012, background): “…can be explained by combinations of genetic, epigenetic, or environmental factors remains to be established; but individual differences will no doubt assume a greater importance in this literature, which to date has been focused almost exclusively on group-level effects (Kanai and Rees, 2011).”