Brian Wandell - Johns Hopkins School of Education

Brian Wandell, Ph.D.
Psychology Department
Stanford University
Purpose
• Explain measurements of developing brain connections
• Reading and Math Examples
• I am here for discussion – Is anything I can do that is useful to you? Courtesy Professor Ugur Ture
Signals between widely separated gray matter regions are carried by long fibers called white matter
Scientists recently learned how to estimate these fibers in the living human brain using magnetic resonance methods: Diffusion tensor imaging, or Diffusion spectrum imaging
Johns Hopkins is a leader in this technology
The properties of certain fibers are correlated with specific cognitive abilities.
For example, certain fibers in the corpus callosum are correlated with phonological decoding
White matter
Ventricle
Fibers
Corpus
callosum
Gray matter
Diffusivity in
callosum that
projects to
temporal
lobes
correlates
with sounding
out words
S
T
P
O
r(45) ~ 0.58
p < 0.001
(Dougherty et al., PNAS,
2007)
Reading-related standard scores
Music and Reading
The Dana Foundation
supported us to examine the relationship between arts training and reading.
Music provided the strongest correlation between arts training and reading.
The music training explains 16% of the variance in children’s scores.
The horizontal axis shows lifetime hours of music training; the vertical axis shows the improvement in reading fluency between years 3 and years 1.
Michal Ben-Shachar
Jessica Tsang
Green shoots
Visual arts and Math
We incidentally discovered that visual art experience is correlated with math skills.
The horizontal axis shows a weekly average of hours spent on visual art activity in school (year 1). The vertical axis shows a measure of math skill. The correlation explains 10% of the variance in children’s scores.
A
B
All fibers in the left hemisphere
Cantlon et al., PLOS Bio, 2006
A
Fibers connecting putative math regions
(Triple-code model, Dehaene, Spelke and others)
anterior superior
longitudinal fasciculus
(aSLF)
r(25) 0.49, p < 0.02
Explains about 25% of
the variance.
No correlation for adjacent track
(arcuate)
The correlation is specific to this
section of the track
Left
Right
Conclusions
• Connections (and other aspects of anatomy) can be measured at young ages (easier than fMRI) • Healthy development of these connections is essential for cognition
• How can we work together?
Robert Dougherty
Visual fields and pRFs
Alyssa Brewer, UC Irvine
Alex Wade, Smith-Kettlewell
Serge Dumoulin, Helmholtz Institute
Hiroshi Horiguchi, Stanford
Kaoru Amano, Tokyo University
Jon Winawer, Stanford
Reading and Math
Michal Ben-Shachar, Bar-Ilan, Tel-Aviv
Adult cortical plasticity
Jessica Tsang, Stanford
Yoichiro Masuda, Jikkei Hospital, Tokyo
Stelios Smirnakis, Baylor College of Medicine
Alyssa Brewer, UC Irvine
Satoshi Nakadomari, Jikkei Hospital, Tokyo
Netta Levin, Hadassah Hospital, Jerusalem
Hiroshi Horiguchi, Stanford
Nikos Logothetis, Tuebingen
Gayle Deutsch, Stanford
Diffusion-methods and qMRI
Anthony Sherbondy, IBM, Almaden
Nikola Stikov, Stanford
Aviv Mezer, Stanford
We gratefully acknowledge support from:
NIH, DARPA, IBM, Dana Foundation, Schwab Foundation,
Microsoft Co.