Professional chess expertise modulates whole brain functional connectivity pattern homogeneity and couplings

Abstract

Previous studies have revealed changed functional connectivity patterns between brain areas in chess players using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI). However, how to exactly characterize the voxel-wise whole brain functional connectivity pattern changes in chess players remains unclear, which could provide more convincing evidence for establishing the relationship between longterm chess practice and brain function changes. In this study, we employed newly developed whole brain functional connectivity pattern homogeneity (FcHo) method to identify the voxel-wise changes of functional connectivity patterns in 28 chess master players and 27 healthy novices. Seed-based functional connectivity analysis was used to identify the alteration of corresponding functional couplings. FcHo analysis revealed signi cantly increased whole brain functional connectivity pattern similarity in anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), anterior middle temporal gyrus (aMTG), primary visual cortex (V1), and decreased FcHo in thalamus and precentral gyrus in chess players. Resting-state functional connectivity analyses identi ed chess players showed decreased functional connections between V1 and precentral gyrus. Besides, a linear support vector machine (SVM) based classi cation achieved an accuracy of 85.45%, a sensitivity of 85.71% and a speci city of 85.19% to differentiate chess players from novices by leave-one-out cross-validation. Finally, correlation analyses revealed that the mean FcHo values of thalamus were signi cantly negatively correlated with the training time. Our ndings provide new evidences for the important roles of ACC, aMTG, V1, thalamus and precentral gyrus in chess players and indicate that long-term professional chess training may enhance the semantic and episodic processing, e ciency of visual-motor transformation, and cognitive ability.

Distinct brain network organizations between club players and novices under different difficulty levels

“…It was discovered that distinctive neural activation patterns were identified in chess experts as compared to those of novices during chess‐related tasks (Campitelli et al., 2007). In particular, functional magnetic resonance imaging studies demonstrated the interplay between the frontal and parietal regions in experts, involving a chunking process during the chess task (Bilalić et al., 2010; Gobet & Charness, 2018; Schubotz et al., 2012; Song et al., 2020; Song et al., 2022). More importantly, previous studies also illustrated that distinct brain regions were involved in the segmentation and concatenation processes within the chunking process.…”

The role of chess in the development of children-parents’ perspectives

“…Others have done research on chess players with different performance levels, with focus on amateur/novice ( Blanch and Llaveria, 2021 ), on professional players/experts (adolescent elite chess players— De Bruin et al, 2007 ; adult international chess grandmaster— Fuentes-García et al, 2022 ) or comparative studies on these categories, that provide more convincing evidences that chess master players are different from novice players in brain functional organization of local connections and global topologies ( Song et al, 2022 ). This type of research focuses on the analysis of the conditions that lead to chess performance, including certain psycho-social and physical characteristics of the player, which we will detail later.…”

Real-World Visual Experience Alters Baseline Brain Activity in the Resting State: A Longitudinal Study Using Expertise Model of Radiologists

“… Harel et al (2010) demonstrated enhanced neuronal activity in the right precuneus of a group of car experts related to better memory retrieval strategies. Song et al (2021) reported increased activation in the right anterior cingulate gyrus, but decreased activation in the superior parietal lobule in chess players ( Song et al, 2020 ), which is closely related to improved visual processing and better attention control. These results derived from cross-sectional studies demonstrated that real-world visual experience alters the strength of evoked brain activity across widely distributed regions, which are supportive of high-order cognitive, such as attention control, working memory, and memory, and low-order visual components, such as visual processing ( Khader et al, 2005 ; Cavanna and Trimble, 2006 ; Schipul and Just, 2016 ).…”