What does this part of the brain do?

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Simon Eickhoff; Professorin Sarah Genon, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience ; Cognitive, Systems and Behavioural Neurobiology
• Term: from 2016 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 288968401

• Final Report Year: 2020

Final Report Abstract

The objective of our project was to better understand behavioral functions, such memory, attention, cognitive control, emotions,…associated with different brain regions. One line of research in this project was to identify associations between grey matter in some brain regions and performance across a range of psychological tests measuring different aspects of human behavior such as personality traits, memory performance, intelligence etc…. This idea was based on a vast amount of previous studies showing that certain type of behavior, cognitive performance or intelligence are related to grey matter volume in some parts of the brain. The previous studies hence suggested that differences between people in aspect of behavior such as extraversion, political orientation, social abilities, memory skills or intelligence could be related to differences between people in grey matter volume in some parts of the brain. The results of these studies have usually conveyed the idea that “we are different because our brains are structurally different”. However, when we started searching for associations between grey matter volume measured with an MRI scanner and measures of behavior (such as personality or IQ) in large samples of healthy people, we found only a few associations that could be considered as statistically significant. When we then tried to replicate the associations found in one sample of healthy people (for example between perceptual IQ and grey matter volume in some brain regions) in another similar sample of healthy people, the replication attempts mostly failed. By using different estimates of grey matter, many different behavioral measures and different samples of participants, we confirmed that there is a general issue of replication for reports of associations between grey matter in some parts of the brain and behavior. Thus, overall, these unexpected findings suggest that the results of previous studies should be seriously questioned and more generally that the common idea of “we are different because our brains are structurally different” seriously lacks reliable scientific evidence.

Publications

• (2017). Searching for behavior relating to grey matter volume in apriori defined right dorsal premotor regions: lessons learned. NeuroImage, 157, 144-156
  Genon, S., Wensing, T., Reid, A., Hoffstaedter, F., Caspers, S., Grefkes, C., Nickl-Jockschat, T., & Eickhoff, S. B.
  
• (2018). Disrupted self in Alzheimer's disease: Beyond midline structures: Commentary on Wong et al. Cortex: A Journal Devoted to the Study of the Nervous System and Behavior, 104, 128-129
  Genon, S., & Salmon, E.
  
• (2018). Evaluation of non-negative matrix factorization of grey matter in age prediction. NeuroImage, 173, 394-410
  Varikuti, D., Genon, S., Sotiras, A., Schwender, H., Hoffstaedter, F., Patil, K., Jockwitz, C., Caspers, S., Moebus, S., Amunts, K., Davatzikos, C., & Eickhoff, S.
  
• (2018). How to Characterize the Function of a Brain Region. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(04), 350-364
  Genon, S., Reid, A., Langner, R., Amunts, K., & Eickhoff, S.
  
• (2018). Imaging-based parcellations of the human brain. Nature Reviews. Neuroscience, 19, 672–686
  Eickhoff, S., Yeo, T., & Genon, S.
  
• (2019). Anosognosia and default mode subnetwork dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease. Human Brain Mapping, 40(18), 5330-5340
  Antoine, N., Bahri, M. A., Bastin, C., Collette, F., Phillips, C., Balteau, E., Genon, S., & Salmon, E.
  
• (2019). Empirical examination of the replicability of associations between brain structure and psychological variables. eLife, 13(8)
  Kharabian Masouleh, S., Eickhoff, S., Hoffstaedter, F., & Genon, S.
  
• (2019). Gender bias in (neuro)science: facts, consequences and solutions. European Journal of Neuroscience, 50(7), 3094-3100
  Schrouff, J., Pischedda, Genon, S., Fryns, G., Pinho, A. L., Vassena, E., Liuzzi, A., & Ferreira, F.
  
• (2019). Multimodal parcellations and extensive behavioral profiling tackling the hippocampus gradient. Cerebral Cortex, 29(11), 4595-4612
  Plachti, A., Eickhoff, S., Hoffstaedter, F., Patil, K., Laird, A., Fox, P., Amunts, K., & Genon, S.