Abstract
Using phase synchronization based on Hilbert transform, we investigated the functional connectivity of the brain while solving scientific problems with uncertainty. It showed that when the students were uncertain about their answers, phase synchronization from the electrode pairs between the anterior and posterior brain regions increased significantly in the delta and theta frequency bands. However, phase synchronization across the central-parietal and occipital regions decreased for uncertainty in the alpha frequency. The higher functional connectivity between the anterior and posterior regions reflected a spread of cortical activation in a top-down manner, by which more executive function were recruited to control the information processing for uncertainty. The lower functional connectivity across the central-parietal and occipital regions suggested that task-specific procedures such as visual perception, semantic memory retrieval and other high-order multisensory processes were less successfully integrated for uncertain responses. This study sheds light on neural mechanism underlying information processing during scientific problem solving with uncertainty. It also provides a deeply understanding of scientific reasoning during learning.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 62077013, the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province under Grant BK20221181, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grants 2242022k30036 and 2242022k30037.
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Zhu, Y., Ye, S., Wang, Q., Zhang, L. (2023). Functional Connectivity of the Brain While Solving Scientific Problems with Uncertainty as Revealed by Phase Synchronization Based on Hilbert Transform. In: Tanveer, M., Agarwal, S., Ozawa, S., Ekbal, A., Jatowt, A. (eds) Neural Information Processing. ICONIP 2022. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1792. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1642-9_24
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