Nice Question Sepideh Javdani Esfahani , Following

Following, too

Hi Sepideh Javdani Esfahani ,

Well almost all of the imaging modalities that you mentioned can be employed as potential methods to assess different variables in a cognitive task. The case here is that to what extent would each be efficient? and which one provides you with the best results according to your question or project hypothesis.

Also, the technicalities such as the costs and access to equipment might be important.

If you would like to address the functional connectivity in ROIs (brain regions of interest) that contribute to speaking/hearing such as auditory cortex, Broca's and Wernicke's areas, etc. then fMRI would be the best choice (disregarding the subtle drawbacks or shortcomings in terms of the proportion of spatial and temporal precision...). And I suppose that the best choice for you could be using fMRI with its powerful methods of tasks design and processing.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S091160440000021X

MEG, EEG and qEEG could be a first and most easily accessible choice to generate some great quantitative data regarding the function and almost always the cortical activity during tasks (i.e. speaking).

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-04464-4/

PET, SPECT, ... can be used mostly for clinical case studies of interpretation and lingual/structural difficulties, or in very specific and thoroughly designed tasks though you can use other modalities such as fMRI for them (i.e. dyslexia...).

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Dear Bahman Sadeghi,

I thank you for the helpful mentioned points. But the main question is if I can use fMRI while my participants are speaking/interpreting? I would like to mention that I intend to investigate the temporal and frontal lobes of interpreters brain.

Regards,

Your participants are not going to be able to talk in the scanner, your best is to design an experiment in which your participants select a translation on the screen with a button box. Generally you can design tasks that allow your participants to have earphones. So within that remit your free to design your experiment. I would recommend having look at what literature if any already exists on fMRI within your topic of interest. A quick google scholar search shows quite a few papers that could be useful to you.

If you don't intend to see direct images, MEG or EEG would be a good application. You can always measure the focus brain areas with these methods. Otherwise, in fMRI I would suggest having the participant processing the interpretation mentally rather than speaking.

Dear Yusuf Daniju,

Thank you for your nice idea (translation on the screen), it seems helpful.

Regards,

Dear Manuela Holst,

Thank your for your reply and suggestion (MEG and EEG). Honestly, processing the interpretation mentally by participants is a good idea, but in this way I was wondering they may not in actual think about my requested topic. So, the results may not be so valid.

Regards,

yes, that's why I thought MEG/EEG would be a good method. They can still speak while they can not speak in the MRI scanner.