Recent research from the McGovern Institute for Brain Research shows that preferences can modulate how children’s brains process language, paving the way for personalized brain research.
The paper, published in the journal Imaging Neuroscience , was conducted in the laboratory of MIT professor and McGovern Institute investigator John Gabrieli and led by lead author Anila DeMello, a recent postdoctoral fellow at the McGovern Institute and currently an associate professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and the University of Texas at Dallas.
“Traditional studies give subjects identical stimuli to avoid confounding results,” says Gabrieli, the Grover Herman Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, “but in our study, we tailored the stimuli to each child’s preferences, producing stronger and more consistent patterns of activity in the language regions of each individual’s brain.”
Funded by the Hock E. Tan and K. Lisa Yang Center for Autism Research at MIT’s Yang Tan Collective, the study uncovers a new paradigm that questions current approaches and shows how personalization can be a powerful strategy in neuroscience. First co-authors of the paper are Haley Olson, a postdoctoral researcher at the McGovern Institute, and Christina Johnson, PhD (’21), an associate professor at Northeastern University and a former doctoral student at the MIT Media Lab. “In our study, we incorporate participants’ lived experiences into the research design,” Johnson said. “This approach not only enhances the validity of our findings, but also captures the diversity of individual perspectives that are often overlooked in traditional research.”
Considering the benefits
When it comes to language, our preferences are like the operators behind the switchboard: they guide what we say and who we talk to. Research shows that hobbies can be powerful motivators and even help improve language skills. For example, children score better on reading tests when their study materials feature topics that interest them.
However, neuroscience has shied away from using personal preferences to study the brain, especially in the realm of language, mainly because different preferences can interfere with experimental control, a fundamental principle that encourages scientists to limit factors that could confound their results.
Gabrieli, DeMello, Olson, and Johnson stepped into this uncharted territory. The team wondered whether tailoring language stimuli to children’s preferences might improve the response of language areas of the brain. “Our study takes a unique approach in that we don’t control the stimuli given to subjects, but rather control the type of brain activity produced in the experiment,” DeMello said. “This is in stark contrast to most neuroimaging studies, where you control the stimuli but still can make a difference in how interested each subject is in the material.”
In a recent study, the authors recruited a group of 20 children to explore how their personal preferences affect how the brain processes language. Parents described their children’s interests to researchers, including baseball, train tracks, Minecraft, and musicals. During the study, the children listened to audio stories tailored to their preferences. For comparison, they also listened to nature audio stories (not child-friendly). To capture brain activity patterns, the team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures changes in blood flow caused by underlying neural activity.
New insights into the brain
“We found that when children heard stories about topics that really interested them, they showed stronger neural responses in language regions than when they heard general stories that didn’t match their interests,” Olson said. “This not only shows how preferences can affect the brain, but also that personalizing experimental stimuli can have a profound effect on neuroimaging outcomes.”
The researchers found one particularly surprising result: “Even though the children heard completely different stories, the children’s brain activation patterns overlapped more with their peers when they listened to the feature stories than when they listened to general nature stories,” DeMello says. She points out that this shows that preferences can promote both the strength and consistency of signals in language regions across subjects without changing the way that language regions communicate with each other.
Gabrieli noted another finding: “In addition to greater engagement of language regions for content of interest, there was also greater activation in brain regions associated with reward and introspection.” Personal preferences are personally relevant and may bring rewards, so personalized stories may increase activation in these regions.
These personalized models may be particularly well suited to studying the brains of unique or neurologically distinct populations: Indeed, the team applied these methods to study language in the brains of children with autism.
This study opens new directions in neuroscience and serves as a prototype for future research to individualize studies to uncover more knowledge about the brain, allowing scientists to more fully understand the types of information processed in specific brain circuits and thus gain a more complete grasp on complex functions such as language.
