Researcher questions years of his own work with a reexamination of fMRI data

Re:Researcher questions years of his own work with a reexami... by pbhjpbhj on Thursday June 04, 2020 @09:52AM (#23416532)

Presumably activity from background tasks, subconscious processes, will be a changing overlay to whatever current conscious tasks are happening. And, again presumably, other overlays like mood exist?

Poor repeatability seems inherent, the starting brain state will be different, the background processes will be different, the accompanying thoughts will be different?

Is this reanalysis looking at something else beyond this: Like, are people using no brain areas in common across some repeated tasks??

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Re:Researcher questions years of his own work with a reexami... by wintermutesGhst on Thursday June 04, 2020 @10:30AM (#23416997)

Well, the issue is that if you accept that brain state will always be different then there isn't much predictive power in the measure.

The conceit was always that you could measure it across a bunch of people and find the commonly active areas across enough datasets. Even with different baselines, the areas critical to the task would elevate above that baseline.

This paper finds that even in a single person, activity (above the baseline) is poorly correlated across recording sessions. They use a technique called intraclass correlation to measure this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intraclass_correlation

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Re:Researcher questions years of his own work with a reexami... by SubiculumCode on Thursday June 04, 2020 @12:17PM (#23418520)

But does not contest whether the mean averages for the sample are reliable, which has been demonstrated repeatedly.

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