Additional considerations

This section of the book addresses how the physics details from the first few chapters come into play as you’re making decisions about how to design a functional MRI experiment. To set the stage for that, we’ll start by laying out a ‘typical’ fMRI experiment.

Naturally, there are a wide variety of possible experimental designs; how you design your experiment is tightly linked to how you plan to analyze your data. Here is a list of notable fMRI papers that represent the diversity of possible stimulus and designs.

Carlson, T. A., Schrater, P., & He, S. (2003). Patterns of activity in the categorical representations of objects. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 15(5), 704-717.

Engel, S. A., Glover, G. H., & Wandell, B. A. (1997). Retinotopic organization in human visual cortex and the spatial precision of functional MRI. Cerebral Cortex (New York, NY: 1991), 7(2), 181-192.

Hasson, U., Nir, Y., Levy, I., Fuhrmann, G., & Malach, R. (2004). Intersubject synchronization of cortical activity during natural vision. Science, 303(5664), 1634-1640.

Kelley, W. M., Macrae, C. N., Wyland, C. L., Caglar, S., Inati, S., & Heatherton, T. F. (2002). Finding the self? An event-related fMRI study. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 14(5), 785-794.

Raichle, M. E., MacLeod, A. M., Snyder, A. Z., Powers, W. J., Gusnard, D. A., & Shulman, G. L. (2001). A default mode of brain function. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(2), 676-682.

Zenger-Landolt, B., & Heeger, D. J. (2003). Response suppression in V1 agrees with psychophysics of surround masking. Journal of Neuroscience, 23(17), 6884-6893.