E. Malaia, R. Ranaweera, G. Tamer, R. B. Wilbur, T. M. Talavage . E. Malaia, R. .... Early acquisition of sign language: what neuroimaging data tell us.
Default network in Deaf Signers . E. Malaia, R. Ranaweera, G. Tamer, R. B. Wilbur, T. M. Talavage Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN Introduction
Methods
The default (or task-negative) network is a set of brain regions which increases activity during passive states [2, 3]. Anatomically, it includes regions along the anterior and posterior midline, inferior parietal cortices, and lateral temporal cortex (LTC) bilaterally.
Participants in this study (13 Deaf native ASL signers, 12 hearing sign-naïve participants) were presented with dynamic video clip stimuli in a block paradigm. During half of the blocks the participants were required to carry out an active task, while the other blocks required only passive viewing. Data were collected at 3 T (GE) using an EPI sequence (TR/TE = 2000/22ms) with FSPGR highresolution anatomical images acquired prior to functional scans. Preliminary fixed effects analysis of data was conducted using SPM5 software, with 3D motion correction, normalization to a standard MNI template and smoothing with a 6mm FWHM Gaussian kernel. The individual contrasts during “no task” vs. “task” activation of each participant were used as the input to onesample t-test random-e ects analysis in SPM5 to obtain group results (Figure 1, summary in Table 1). No activation clusters were found in the LTC of Deaf Signers (FDR-corrected, p
