The Core of Hypotheses for fMRI Experiments

Abstract

In functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, there has been a general tendency amongst researchers to examine the relative magnitudes of brain responses to experimental stimuli compared with a control condition or to different tasks that subjects performed during stimulus presentation. The current neuroimaging convention is that the statistical significance (e.g., p- value) of the average difference across trials and subjects is indicative of the robustness of the experimental effect. The brain activation maps are reported by showing anatomy in the background, with coloured overlays indicating those voxels with a level of significance exceeding a p-value threshold (e.g., p