Atlases of cognition with large-scale human brain mapping

To map the neural substrate of mental function, cognitive neuroimaging relies on controlled psychological manipulations that engage brain systems associated with specific cognitive processes. In order to build comprehensive atlases of cognitive function in the brain, it must assemble maps for many different cognitive processes, which often evoke overlapping patterns of activation. Such data aggregation faces contrasting goals: on the one hand finding correspondences across vastly different cognitive experiments, while on the other hand precisely describing the function of any given brain region. Here we introduce a new analysis framework that tackles these difficulties and thereby enables the generation of brain atlases for cognitive function. The approach leverages ontologies of cognitive concepts and multi-label brain decoding to map the neural substrate of these concepts. We demonstrate the approach by building an atlas of functional brain organization based on 30 diverse functional neuroimaging studies, totaling 196 different experimental conditions. Unlike conventional brain mapping, this functional atlas supports robust reverse inference: predicting the mental processes from brain activity in the regions delineated by the atlas. To establish that this reverse inference is indeed governed by the corresponding concepts, and not idiosyncrasies of experimental designs, we show that it can accurately decode the cognitive concepts recruited in new tasks. These results demonstrate that aggregating independent task-fMRI studies can provide a more precise global atlas of selective associations between brain and cognition.

为刻画心理功能的神经底物（neural substrate），认知神经影像学依赖于能够激活与特定认知过程相关脑系统的受控心理学操控手段。为构建大脑认知功能的全面图谱，需整合针对多种不同认知过程的映射结果——而这些认知过程往往会引发重叠的脑激活模式。这类数据整合面临着相互矛盾的双重目标：一方面需要在差异极大的各类认知实验中建立关联，另一方面又要精准描述任一特定脑区的功能。为此，本文提出一种全新的分析框架，可攻克上述难题，进而支持认知功能脑图谱的构建。该框架借助认知概念本体论（ontologies）与多标签脑解码（multi-label brain decoding）技术，对这些概念的神经底物进行映射。我们基于30项涵盖范围广泛的功能神经影像学研究（共包含196种不同实验条件）构建了大脑功能组织图谱，以此验证了该方法的有效性。与传统脑图谱绘制方法不同，该功能图谱支持稳健的反向推理（reverse inference）：即通过图谱划定的脑区活动，反推对应的心理过程。为验证该反向推理确实由对应的认知概念所驱动，而非实验设计的特异性所致，我们证明其可精准解码全新任务中所招募的认知概念。上述结果表明，整合独立的任务态功能磁共振成像（task-fMRI）研究，可构建出更为精准的脑-认知选择性关联全局图谱。