Teacher-student neural coupling during teaching and learning.

Human communication is remarkably versatile, enabling teachers to share highly abstracted and novel information with their students. What neural processes enable such transfer of information across brains during naturalistic teaching and learning? Here, a teacher was scanned in functional magnetic resonance imaging while giving an oral lecture with slides on a scientific topic followed by a review lecture. Students were then scanned while watching either the intact Lecture and Review (N = 20) or a temporally scrambled version of the lecture (N = 20). Using intersubject correlation, we observed widespread Teacher-Student neural coupling spanning sensory cortex and language regions along the superior temporal sulcus as well as higher-level regions including posterior medial cortex (PMC), superior parietal lobule, and dorsolateral and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. Teacher-student alignment in higher-level areas was not observed when learning was disrupted by temporally scrambling the lecture. Moreover, teacher-student coupling in PMC was significantly correlated with learning: the more closely the student's brain mirrored the teacher's brain, the more the student improved their learning score. Together, these results suggest that the alignment of neural responses between teacher and students may reflect effective communication of complex information across brains in classroom settings.

The "Narratives" fMRI dataset for evaluating models of naturalistic language comprehension.

The "Narratives" collection aggregates a variety of functional MRI datasets collected while human subjects listened to naturalistic spoken stories. The current release includes 345 subjects, 891 functional scans, and 27 diverse stories of varying duration totaling ~4.6 hours of unique stimuli (~43,000 words). This data collection is well-suited for naturalistic neuroimaging analysis, and is intended to serve as a benchmark for models of language and narrative comprehension. We provide standardized MRI data accompanied by rich metadata, preprocessed versions of the data ready for immediate use, and the spoken story stimuli with time-stamped phoneme- and word-level transcripts. All code and data are publicly available with full provenance in keeping with current best practices in transparent and reproducible neuroimaging.

The association between latent trauma and brain structure in children.

The developing brain is marked by high plasticity, which can lead to vulnerability to early life stressors. Previous studies indicate that childhood maltreatment is associated with structural aberrations across a number of brain regions. However, prior work is limited by small sample sizes, heterogeneous age groups, the examination of one structure in isolation, the confounding of different types of early life stressors, and not accounting for socioeconomic status. These limitations may contribute to high variability across studies. The present study aimed to investigate how trauma is specifically associated with cortical thickness and gray matter volume (GMV) differences by leveraging a large sample of children (N = 9270) from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive DevelopmentSM Study (ABCD Study®). A latent measure of trauma exposure was derived from DSM-5 traumatic events, and we related this measure of trauma to the brain using structural equation modeling. Trauma exposure was associated with thinner cortices in the bilateral superior frontal gyri and right caudal middle frontal gyrus (pfdr-values < .001) as well as thicker cortices in the left isthmus cingulate and posterior cingulate (pfdr-values ≤ .027), after controlling age, sex, and race/ethnicity. Furthermore, trauma exposure was associated with smaller GMV in the right amygdala and right putamen (pfdr-values ≤ .048). Sensitivity analyses that controlled for income and parental education were largely consistent with the main findings for cortical thickness. These results suggest that trauma may be an important risk factor for structural aberrations, specifically for cortical thickness differences in frontal and cingulate regions in children.