Cognitive Difference of Thinking Process between Science and General High School Students‘ Brain Activations on Biological Classification

초록

Biological classification is a convergent and creative thinking process as a representative of inductive reasoning. Also, it is involved in the discovery process of a similarity of object properties, criteria of object classification, and categories of observed objects. In science education context, neurological investigation on biological classification is important to understand the inner process of student’s cognitive thinking. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to identify neurological characteristics on biological classification in scientifically gifted students comparing with general student. To identify students' neurological characte- ristics, 9 gifted students and 9 general high school students were recruited in this study. Block experi- mental-design was used to measure subjects’ BOLD signals of their brain. SPM8 software was applied to analyze the acquired MR image data from the 3.0T fMRI system. We could find functional activation regions of brain during biological classification by the main effect analysis, and identify unique activation regions of the gifted student by group effect analysis. According to the result of this study, there was some significant differences between the gifted students’ brain regions and general students’ brain activation regions. Also, the gifted student could perform bottom-up type thinking with the related multiple brain systems during classification task. However, the general student could maintain top-down type thinking with the restricted interaction among brain systems. Consequently, thinking process of the science-gifted students during biological classification was related to multiple brain systems with dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex, visual cortex and basal ganglia. In contrary, the general student’s brain system during classification was restricted to partial system with premotor cortex, parietal cortex, visual cortex.

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