Can neuroimaging help aphasia researchers? Addressing generalizability, variability, and interpretability

ABSTRACT

Neuroimaging studies of individuals with brain damage seek to link brain structure and activity to cognitive impairments, spontaneous recovery, or treatment outcomes. To date, such studies have relied on the critical assumption that a given anatomical landmark corresponds to the same functional unit(s) across individuals. However, this assumption is fallacious even across neurologically healthy individuals. Here, we discuss the severe implications of this issue, and argue for an approach that circumvents it, whereby: (i) functional brain regions are defined separately for each subject using fMRI, allowing for inter-individual variability in their precise location; (ii) the response profile of these subject-specific regions are characterized using various other tasks; and (iii) the results are averaged across individuals, guaranteeing generalizabliity. This method harnesses the complementary strengths of single-case studies and group studies, and it eliminates the need for post hoc “reverse inference” from anatomical landmarks back to cognitive operations, thus improving data interpretability.

KEYWORDS:

• Aphasia
• fMRI
• functional localization
• group studies
• individual differences

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We refer to the dissociation between lexical-semantics and syntax for illustrative purposes only. fMRI data from neurologically intact individuals (using subject-specific functional localization) demonstrate that each and every region in the left-hemispheric language network responds to both lexical-semantics and syntax across different experimental paradigms (Fedorenko, Mineroff, Siegelman, & Blank, 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [grant number K99/R00 award HD 057522].