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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Hum. Neurosci.
Sec. Cognitive Neuroscience
Volume 18 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2024.1506661
This article is part of the Research Topic Unlocking Brain-Behavior Dynamics: Next-Generation Approaches and Methods View all articles

Harnessing slow event-related fMRI to investigate trial-level brain behavior relationships during object identification

Provisionally accepted
  • 1 Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, National Institute of Mental Health (NIH), Bethesda, MD, United States
  • 2 Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Understanding brain-behavior relationships is the core goal of cognitive neuroscience.However, these relationships -especially those related to complex cognitive and psychopathological behaviors -have recently been shown to suffer from very small effect sizes (0.1 or less), requiring potentially thousands of participants to yield robust findings. Here, we focus on a much more optimistic case utilizing task-based fMRI and a multi-echo acquisition with trial-level brain-behavior associations measured within participant. In a visual object identification task for which the behavioral measure is response time (RT), we show that while trial-level associations between BOLD and RT can similarly suffer from weak effect sizes, converting these associations to their corresponding group-level effects can yield robust peak effect sizes (Cohen's d = 1.0 or larger). Multi-echo denoising (Multi-Echo ICA or ME-ICA) yields larger effects than optimally combined multi-echo with no denoising, which is in turn an improvement over standard single-echo acquisition. While estimating these brain-behavior relationships benefits from the inclusion of a large number of trials per participant, even a modest number of trials (20-30 or more) yields robust group-level effect sizes, with replicable effects obtainable with relatively standard sample sizes (N = 20-30 participants per sample).

    Keywords: effect size, Correlation, BOLD fMRI, test-retest reliability, Response Time

    Received: 05 Oct 2024; Accepted: 31 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Gotts, Gilmore and Martin. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Stephen J. Gotts, Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, National Institute of Mental Health (NIH), Bethesda, 20892, MD, United States

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