An MRI Study on Effects of Math Education on Brain Development Using Multi-Instance Contrastive Learning

This paper explores whether mathematical education has effects on brain development from the perspective of brain MRIs. While biochemical changes in the left middle front gyrus region of the brain have been investigated, we proposed to classify students by using MRIs from the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) region that was left untouched in the previous study. On the cropped IPS regions, the proposed model developed popular contrastive learning (CL) to solve the problem of multi-instance representation learning. The resulted data representations were then fed into a linear neural network to identify whether students were in the math group or the non-math group. Experiments were conducted on 123 adolescent students, including 72 math students and 51 non-math students. The proposed model achieved an accuracy of 90.24 % for student classification, gaining more than 5% improvements compared to the classical CL frame. Our study provides not only a multi-instance extension to CL and but also an MRI insight into the impact of mathematical studying on brain development.