Journal of neuroimaging : official journal of the American Society of Neuroimaging
July 1, 2026 · via Europe PMC
A Task-Based Functional MRI Double Dissociation of Visual Language and Feature Processing in Healthy Adults.
Redway S, Hsiao H, Zeng E, Shahki J, Woodward TS.
AI summary — for doctors, generated from the abstract only
Task-based fMRI in healthy adults showed a double dissociation between visual-feature and language processing modes.
What was studied
Analysis of the Coherence-Semantic task from the Midnight Scan Club dataset (10 healthy adults, 10 sessions each at 3T) using whole-brain dimensionality reduction and FIR regression.
Key findings
- Focus on Visual Features mode activated during the motion coherence task but not the semantic task
- Language mode activated during the semantic task but not the coherence task
- Default mode deactivated in both conditions
Clinical relevance
This basic neuroscience work supports the separability of cognitive modes by fMRI, which may eventually inform presurgical mapping, but has no direct clinical application yet.
Who should care
Limitations
Only 10 healthy participants from a single public dataset; no patient data.
fMRI can cleanly separate visual and language processing networks in healthy brains.
This is an AI-generated summary of the published abstract, not a clinical recommendation. It may not reflect the full text or subsequent updates — verify against the original source before acting on it.
Abstract
Background/purpose
Task-based functional MRI (fMRI) can identify spatial and temporal brain configurations of blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) activity for dissociable cognitive functions. Evidence for the discriminability of spatial/temporal/functional combinations (i.e., cognitive modes) can be achieved through the dissociation of task-based BOLD signal changes following whole-brain dimension reduction. A double dissociation can be achieved by task-induced BOLD-change activation of mode A in condition A but not B, and vice versa for activation in mode B. In this study, we analyzed the Coherence-Semantic task from the Midnight Scan Club dataset to test for a double dissociation of Focus on Visual Features (FoVF) from Language (LAN) modes.
Methods
The Coherence-Semantic task involved 10 healthy participants scanned over 10 sessions on a 3-Tesla MRI scanner. The task included (1) identifying coherent or random movements of dots (Coherence condition) and (2) identifying a noun versus a verb (Semantic condition). fMRI data were analyzed by combining finite impulse response multivariate multiple regression with whole-brain dimensionality reduction. The dissociations were evaluated at the level of subject-specific task-induced BOLD changes using repeated-measures ANOVAs comparing the Coherence and Semantic conditions.
Results
A double dissociation was observed: FoVF showed task-induced increases in BOLD activation during the Coherence condition, with no significant task-related activation during the Semantic condition, and vice versa for LAN. The default mode (DM) also showed task-related deactivation in both conditions.
Conclusions
This double dissociation provides evidence for the temporal and functional discriminability of FoVF and LAN, contributing to evidence supporting the discriminability of cognitive modes detectable by fMRI.
DOI
10.1111/jon.70139
PMID
42444338
PMCID
PMC13366033
Research metadata (titles, abstracts, authors, publication dates) is sourced from Europe PMC, which aggregates content from PubMed/MEDLINE, PubMed Central, and other providers under the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM/NCBI). NLM does not claim copyright on abstracts; the original journal publishers or authors may hold rights to the full articles. AI-generated summaries are derived only from the abstract, never the full text, and are always labeled as AI-generated.
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