생물학자와 고등학생의 생물학 가설 생성에서 나타나는 두뇌활성 : fMRI 연구

The purpose of this study was to analyze the biologists` and high school students` brain activation patterns in the generation of scientific hypotheses on biological phenomena. Eight right-handed healthy biologists and 8 right-handed healthy general high school students volunteered to be participants in the present study. Stimuli within the hypothesis generation tasks were presented in a block design for the fMRI-scanning. The BOLD signals of the participants` brain were measured by 3.0T fMRI system and data were analyzed using Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM2). According to the results, the occipito-parietal pathway was activated in both groups. However, the significant and unique activations in the biologist group were mainly observed in the left prefrontal cortex (middle frontal gyrus; BA 9), which is presumably related to simple declarative memory encoding or retrieval. By contrast, high school students showed a significant activation in left SMA (BA 6)-right cerebellum circuit-, left FEF region (BA 8) and bilateral fusiform gyrus (BA 37). These findings provide an interpretation that (1) biologists` higher scientific thinking power (i.e., biological hypothesis generation) is presumably involved in the middle frontal gyrus, which is related to effective integrating of the internally and externally induced informations; (2) general high school students was using verbal strategy, retrieving episodic memory and analytic observation for acquiring more information about questioning situation. These results suggested that the process of the scientific hypothesis generation is extremely unique and complicated process in higher thinking.