Previous studies have revealed changed functional connectivity patterns between brain areas in chess players using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI). However, how to exactly characterize the voxel-wise whole brain functional connectivity pattern changes in chess players remains unclear. It could provide more convincing evidence for establishing the relationship between long-term chess practice and brain function changes. In this study, we employed newly developed whole brain functional connectivity pattern homogeneity (FcHo) method to identify the voxel-wise changes of functional connectivity patterns in 28 chess master players and 27 healthy novices. Seed-based functional connectivity analysis was used to identify the alteration of corresponding functional couplings. FcHo analysis revealed significantly increased whole brain functional connectivity pattern similarity in anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), anterior middle temporal gyrus (aMTG), primary visual cortex (V1), and decreased FcHo in thalamus and precentral gyrus in chess players. Resting-state functional connectivity analyses identified chess players showing decreased functional connections between V1 and precentral gyrus. Besides, a linear support vector machine (SVM) based classification achieved an accuracy of 85.45%, a sensitivity of 85.71% and a specificity of 85.19% to differentiate chess players from novices by leave-one-out cross-validation. Finally, correlation analyses revealed that the mean FcHo values of thalamus were significantly negatively correlated with the training time. Our findings provide new evidences for the important roles of ACC, aMTG, V1, thalamus and precentral gyrus in chess players. The findings also indicate that long-term professional chess training may enhance the semantic and episodic processing, efficiency of visual-motor transformation, and cognitive ability.

先前的研究表明，使用静息状态功能磁共振成像 (rs-fMRI) 的国际象棋选手大脑区域之间的功能连接模式发生了变化。然而，如何准确描述国际象棋选手的体素全脑功能连接模式变化仍不清楚。它可以为建立长期国际象棋练习与大脑功能变化之间的关系提供更有说服力的证据。在这项研究中，我们采用新开发的全脑功能连接模式同质性 (FcHo) 方法来识别 28 名国际象棋大师和 27 名健康新手的功能连接模式的体素变化。基于种子的功能连通性分析用于识别相应功能耦合的改变。FcHo 分析显示，前扣带皮层 (ACC)、前颞中回 (aMTG)、初级视觉皮层 (V1) 的全脑功能连接模式相似性显着增加，国际象棋棋手丘脑和中央前回的 FcHo 降低。静息状态功能连接分析确定了国际象棋选手在 V1 和中央前回之间的功能连接减少。此外，基于线性支持向量机 (SVM) 的分类通过留一法交叉验证实现了 85.45% 的准确率、85.71% 的灵敏度和 85.19% 的特异性，以区分棋手和新手。最后，相关性分析显示，丘脑的平均 FcHo 值与训练时间呈显着负相关。我们的研究结果为国际象棋棋手ACC、aMTG、V1、丘脑和中央前回的重要作用提供了新的证据。研究结果还表明，长期的专业国际象棋训练可以增强语义和情景处理、视觉运动转换的效率和认知能力。