Visual experience modulates whole‐brain connectivity dynamics: A resting‐state fMRI study using the model of radiologists

Abstract

Visual expertise refers to proficiency in visual recognition. It is attributed to accumulated visual experience in a specific domain and manifests in widespread neural activities that extend well beyond the visual cortex to multiple high‐level brain areas. An extensive body of studies has centered on the neural mechanisms underlying a distinctive domain of visual expertise, while few studies elucidated how visual experience modulates resting‐state whole‐brain connectivity dynamics. The current study bridged this gap by modeling the subtle alterations in interregional spontaneous connectivity patterns with a group of superior radiological interns. Functional connectivity analysis was based on functional brain segmentation, which was derived from a data‐driven clustering approach to discriminate subtle changes in connectivity dynamics. Our results showed there was radiographic visual experience accompanied with integration within brain circuits supporting visual processing and decision making, integration across brain circuits supporting high‐order functions, and segregation between high‐order and low‐order brain functions. Also, most of these alterations were significantly correlated with individual nodule identification performance. Our results implied that visual expertise is a controlled, interactive process that develops from reciprocal interactions between the visual system and multiple top‐down factors, including semantic knowledge, top‐down attentional control, and task relevance, which may enhance participants' local brain functional integration to promote their acquisition of specific visual information and modulate the activity of some regions for lower‐order visual feature processing to filter out nonrelevant visual details. The current findings may provide new ideas for understanding the central mechanism underlying the formation of visual expertise.

Visual expertise modulates resting-state brain network dynamics in radiologists: a degree centrality analysis

“…Visual expertise is a cognitive process that involves visual object recognition ability in a specific domain, resulting in superior visual object recognition performance (Harel, 2016 ; Wang et al, 2021 ). The development of visual expertise is thought to involve reciprocal interactions between the visual system and multiple high-level areas across the brain (Harel, 2016 ).…”

“…This finding was supported by Bilalic et al ( 2016 ) who showed that FFA could help radiologists discriminate X-ray stimuli from other stimuli and then contribute to the evaluation of radiographic images. Lastly, Wang et al ( 2021 ) proposed that visual experience could modulate the functional adaptation of the visual cortex and other cognitive areas that are responsible for decision making, semantic knowledge, and attention, as evidenced by widely altered functional connectivity in the entire cortex including the SFG, MFG, orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), and fusiform gyrus (FuG). Collectively, these studies suggest that the activation of these circuits or brain areas constitutes a cortical organizing principle of visual expertise in the brain, such as visual processing, attention control, decision making, and semantic memory.…”

“…The DC method combined with a novel but sensitive machine learning method, i.e., a recursive feature elimination-support vector machine (RFE-SVM) (Ding et al, 2015 ), was employed to look for the highest discriminative power between the radiology intern (RI) group and the normal control (NC) group. We expect that visual experience modulates the expertise-related brain areas beyond the visual cortex and even other cognitive areas, thus supporting working memory (WM), memory, attention control, and decision making (Harel et al, 2013 ; Harel, 2016 ; Wang et al, 2021 ).…”

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

“…Specifically, we used questionnaires to ensure that the subjects had no visual expertise of other known domains, such as aircrafts, animals, and plants. The behavioral tasks were conducted after MRI scanning, aiming to quantify the level of face expertise and radiological expertise, using the Cambridge face memory test (CFMT) ( Duchaine and Nakayama, 2006 ) and radiological expertise task ( Evans et al, 2011 ) respectively, as introduced in our previous studies ( Wang et al, 2021 ; Zhang et al, 2022 ).…”

Visual expertise modulates baseline brain activity: a preliminary resting-state fMRI study using expertise model of radiologists

“…Among all the issues related to resting state spontaneous neuronal activity, the baseline brain activity is of particular significance. The baseline spontaneous neuronal activity reflects cortical excitability [ 21 , 31 ], the alteration of which influences the strength of connection and connectomes-based analysis in resting fMRI studies [ 32 , 33 ], as well as pattern of the spatial activation under task [ 34 , 35 ]. Previous studies used the amplitude of low-frequency (< 0.08 Hz) fluctuation (ALFF) as the metric of brain intrinsic activity [ 35 , 36 ].…”