Understanding the functional organization of the anterior temporal lobe using multi-echo precision fMRI

The human brain contains a region called the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) that plays a central role in distinct aspects of human intelligence—understanding language, recognizing people, and making sense of the world around us. Scientists do not have a clear picture of how this brain region is organized or exactly what it does, in part because standard brain imaging methods produce poor-quality data from this area. This gap in knowledge has real consequences: the ATL is affected in devastating neurological conditions like Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia, and it is surgically removed in some patients with severe epilepsy, which can result in lasting impairments to language and memory. This project uses state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques that overcome the limitations of previous approaches, making it possible for the first time to precisely map the functional organization of the ATL. There are plans to share the results openly with the scientific community. The potential impacts of the project include helping to guide neurosurgeons in protecting critical brain tissue, improving understanding of why dementia affects people differently, and advancing public knowledge of the brain through community outreach events. In order to precisely map the organization of the ATL, the project uses a new technique called multi-echo functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to provide high-quality signal from this area. The research tests the hypothesis that the ATL contains multiple distinct functional subregions organized around at least two types of specialization: areas involved in understanding other people and areas involved in language processing. To rigorously test this hypothesis, the researchers study individual human participants engaged in a large battery of cognitive tasks across multiple scan sessions and generate detailed maps of the organization of brain responses. Cognitive tasks include reading sentences and paragraphs, viewing videos of familiar and unfamiliar people or control stimuli, hearing vocal sounds, and reasoning about other peoples’ internal mental states. In addition to mapping the organization of responses within the ATL, the investigators plan to determine how these areas interact with other regions across the whole brain and study what information is encoded in each region. Taken together, the research aims to produce a comprehensive functional atlas of the ATL and resolve longstanding debates about the contributions of this region to high-level cognition. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2615253 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Benjamin Deen | Institution: Tulane University, NEW ORLEANS, LA | Award Amount: $964,177 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2615253 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2615253.html