It is important for fully understanding the neurobiological meaning of resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and its potential clinical application to explore the relationship between resting state fMRI and individual differences in cognitive ability. However, there is little study to investigate this issue. In this dissertation, we attempt to cast light on the relationship between resting state fMRI and intelligence differences. The main contributions include as follows. 1. We took the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortices as the seed regions and investigated the correlations across subjects between individual intelligence scores and the strength of the functional connectivity (FC) between the seed regions and other brain regions. We found that the brain regions in which the strength of the FC significantly correlated with intelligence scores were distributed in the frontal, parietal, occipital and limbic lobes. These findings support a network view of intelligence, as suggested in previous studies. More importantly, our findings suggest that brain activity may be relevant to the differences in intelligence even in the resting state and in the absence of an explicit cognitive demand. 2. We investigated the relationship between the default mode network and intelligence differences. We found that posterior cingulate cortex is the most important hub node within the default mode network; the default mode network could functionally consist of some sub-systems, for example, left and right parahippocampal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex and median prefrontal cortex, and left and right lateral parietal cortex; some functional connectivity showed that their strength would be significantly correlated to the individual intelligence ability, especially the FC between retrosplenial and bilateral parahippocampal cortex. 3. We explored whether the above finding from the resting state fMRI had the neuroanatomical basis separately from the perspective of the volume of brain gray and white matter and the fiber tracking. We found that the volume of gray matter in some brain region showed the significant difference among the subjects with different intelligence ability, and the part of these brain regions were consistent with our previous fMRI study. Additionally, we can successfully track for every subject the fiber connecting retrosplenial and bilateral parahippocampal cortex. These results could support our finding from the resting state fMRI. In summary, we concluded that resting state fMRI was associated with the individual differences in intelligence and these brain regions and FC that show different activity pattern should have a neruoanatomical basis.
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