The Brain on Anatomy: An Exploration of Neural Organization in Anatomy Novices and Experts Using fMRI
Authors: Smith Theodore C. 
Published: May 2022

Introduction

Expertise literature shows us that behaviorally, experts and novices use different schemas to organize information and these varying schemas are a main factor is the disparity of abilities. For anatomy, content organization is dominated by two models: systemic anatomy and regional anatomy and each has been studied extensively in specific health fields. However, the neural organization of anatomical knowledge has not been clearly examined, especially in regard to identifying a novice organization vs an expert organization. Looking outside the typical educational research toolbox, this study details the use of function magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during an anatomical term semantic task. The field of neurosemantics provides researchers with unique tools such as fMRI and machine learning, to discover the neural underpinnings of anatomical knowledge organization.

Materials and Methods

In this study, anatomy novices (n = 10: 5 male, 5 female; all enrolled in IUB’s ANAT A215: Basic Human Anatomy Fall 2018 course) and anatomy experts (n= 5, all female; all faculty/graduate students in IU’s Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology) underwent semantic and cognitive testing during a fMRI scan to track their neural activity.

The semantic task asked participants to think about the location of an anatomical structure when it appeared on screen. Each participants completed a session that consisted of 6 experimental blocks, with each term appearing for 3 seconds followed by a 4‐second appearance of a neutral focusing point. Novices also completed a demographics survey and experimental debrief survey to collect behavioral information.

This study was completed at the Imaging Research Facility in the IUB Psychological and Brain Sciences Department, home to a Siemens 3 Tesla Prima MRI scanner. This study received expedited approval by the Indiana University Institutional Review Board (Protocol # 1707519677).

Results

Results indicate that anatomy novices have a shared neural organization around details of anatomical structure (e.g., shape, location, function) that disagrees with their behavioral preference of organizations (e.g., systems, regional). Experts, however, had uninterpretable factors that may be due to their breadth and depth of experience. Both cohorts demonstrated activation in brain areas associated with working memory and mental imagery. A major difference between was absence of parietal activation in experts, which may be a sign of a lack of egocentric spatial navigation. Anatomy novices did show parietal activation and self‐reported using “on my own body” mental imagery during the scan, further supporting their use of egocentric spatial navigation. A machine learning classifier was unable to be trained to a viable level of prediction but results from the machine learning analysis indicate that anatomy novices with prior anatomy education do have more consistent neural organizations than those without prior anatomy experience.

Conclusion

This work demonstrates that even on the neural level of organization, anatomy novices and excerpts rely on different schemas, which is confirmed in the behavioral cognitive literature on expertise. This study also shows that neural organization can vastly differ to the behavioral organization a novice uses to organize anatomical structures and highlights the importance of embodied learning and spatial ability within anatomical education. Further, this work demonstrates that an interdisciplinary lens can bring new perspectives to educational research in the support of better learning environments for our students.