期刊名称：International Journal of Environmental and Science Education
电子版ISSN：1306-3065
出版年度：2012
卷号：7
期号：1
页码：83-106
出版社：IJESE
摘要：Where do scientists’ superior abilities originate from when generating a creative idea? What different brain functions are activated between scientists and i) general academic high school students and ii) science high school students when generating a biological hypothe-sis? To reveal brain level explanations for these questions, this paper investigated neural connectivity differences between general and science high school students and biologists during hypothesis-generating and hypothesis-understanding using fMRI. Researchers de-signed two sets of task paradigm on biological phenomena, one for hypothesis-generating and the other for hypothesis-understanding. Thirty-six healthy participants (twelve partici-pants per group) were given hypothesis generating and understanding tasks. Results showed strong interconnections of functional connectivity in the biologist group, which is acknowl-edged as possessing superior hypothesis generation skills. The group was also found to have significant functional connectivity between the frontal cortex and the mesolimbic sys-tem, which has been documented as the fronto-striatal pathway. Moreover, the biologist group recorded higher interconnections in other functional connectivities known to be asso-ciated with hypothesis-generating. Taken together, it can be concluded that the hypothesis-generating skill gap between groups resulted from activation of particular regions as well as interconnections of functional connectivity related to network fluidity. Specially, the biolo-gists’ hypothesis-generating superior skill resulted from highly strengthened interconnec-tions of functional connectivity.
关键词：High school student; Biologist; Functional brain connectivity; Hypothesis-generating; Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
