Cortical thickness and functional connectivity changes in Chinese chess experts

Repeated practice to acquire expertise could result in the structural and functional changes in relevant brain circuits as a result of long-term potentiation, neurogenesis, glial genesis, and remodeling. The goal of this study is to use surface-based morphology (SBM) to study cortical thickness differences in Chinese chess experts and novices, and to use regions of cortical thickness differences as seeds to guide a resting state connectivity analysis of the same population. A raw public dataset from Huaxi MR Research Center consisting of 29 Chinese chess experts and 29 novices was used in this study, with both T1-weighted and resting state functional MRI. Surface based morphometry was performed on the T1 images with the Freesurfur pipeline, with a vertex significance threshold of p