The early origins and the growing popularity of the individual-subject analytic approach in human neuroscience
In the last three decades, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has transformed the field of cognitive neuroscience. A standard analytic approach entails aligning a set of individual activation maps in a common brain space, performing a statistical test in each voxel, and interpreting signif...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Elsevier BV
2021
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/138409 |
| _version_ | 1826207177082142720 |
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| author | Fedorenko, Evelina |
| author_facet | Fedorenko, Evelina |
| author_sort | Fedorenko, Evelina |
| collection | MIT |
| description | In the last three decades, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has transformed the field of cognitive neuroscience. A standard analytic approach entails aligning a set of individual activation maps in a common brain space, performing a statistical test in each voxel, and interpreting significant activation clusters with respect to macroanatomic landmarks. In the last several years, however, this group-analytic approach is being increasingly replaced by analyses where neural responses are examined within each brain individually. In this opinion piece, I trace the origins of individual-subject analyses in human neuroscience and speculate on why group analyses had risen vastly in popularity during the 2000s. I then discuss a core problem with group analyses — their limited utility in informing the human cognitive architecture — and talk about how the individual-subject functional localization approach solves this problem. Finally, I discuss other reasons for why researchers have been turning to individual-subject analyses, and argue that such approaches are likely to be the future of human neuroscience. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T13:45:34Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/138409 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T13:45:34Z |
| publishDate | 2021 |
| publisher | Elsevier BV |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1384092021-12-10T03:16:33Z The early origins and the growing popularity of the individual-subject analytic approach in human neuroscience Fedorenko, Evelina In the last three decades, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has transformed the field of cognitive neuroscience. A standard analytic approach entails aligning a set of individual activation maps in a common brain space, performing a statistical test in each voxel, and interpreting significant activation clusters with respect to macroanatomic landmarks. In the last several years, however, this group-analytic approach is being increasingly replaced by analyses where neural responses are examined within each brain individually. In this opinion piece, I trace the origins of individual-subject analyses in human neuroscience and speculate on why group analyses had risen vastly in popularity during the 2000s. I then discuss a core problem with group analyses — their limited utility in informing the human cognitive architecture — and talk about how the individual-subject functional localization approach solves this problem. Finally, I discuss other reasons for why researchers have been turning to individual-subject analyses, and argue that such approaches are likely to be the future of human neuroscience. 2021-12-09T19:34:40Z 2021-12-09T19:34:40Z 2021 2021-12-09T19:30:13Z Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/138409 Fedorenko, Evelina. 2021. "The early origins and the growing popularity of the individual-subject analytic approach in human neuroscience." Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 40. en 10.1016/J.COBEHA.2021.02.023 Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ application/pdf image/png Elsevier BV Prof. Fedorenko |
| spellingShingle | Fedorenko, Evelina The early origins and the growing popularity of the individual-subject analytic approach in human neuroscience |
| title | The early origins and the growing popularity of the individual-subject analytic approach in human neuroscience |
| title_full | The early origins and the growing popularity of the individual-subject analytic approach in human neuroscience |
| title_fullStr | The early origins and the growing popularity of the individual-subject analytic approach in human neuroscience |
| title_full_unstemmed | The early origins and the growing popularity of the individual-subject analytic approach in human neuroscience |
| title_short | The early origins and the growing popularity of the individual-subject analytic approach in human neuroscience |
| title_sort | early origins and the growing popularity of the individual subject analytic approach in human neuroscience |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/138409 |
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