“You develop this incorrect picture of what’s actually happening in the brain,” she said.įor the study, researchers assessed how well fMRI analyses across a range of scales were able to detect effects, or changes in fMRI signals as participants perform different activities, revealing which parts of the brain are engaged. “For more sophisticated cognitive processes, it’s unlikely that many areas of the brain are wholly uninvolved,” added Stephanie Noble, a postdoctoral associate in Scheinost’s lab at Yale School of Medicine and lead author of the study.įocusing on small areas leaves out other regions that may be involved in the behavior or process under study, which can affect the direction of future research as well. Oversimplifying, he said, leads to inaccurate conclusions.
It’s complex,” said Dustin Scheinost, an associate professor of radiology and biomedical imaging and senior author of the study. But a growing body of evidence shows that brain processes, and complex processes in particular, aren’t limited to small parts of the brain. As one example of this approach, researchers look for brain regions that become more “active” when a particular activity is performed, homing in on small areas with the strongest activation. Studies employing fMRI typically focus on small areas of the brain. 4 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In a new study, they evaluated various approaches and found that zooming out and taking a wider field of view captures additional relevant information that a narrow focus leaves out, offering greater understanding of neural interplay.įurther, these more encompassing results may help address neuroimaging’s reproducibility problem, in which some findings presented in studies cannot be reproduced by other researchers. But typical fMRI methods may be missing key information and providing only part of the picture, Yale researchers say. Researchers have learned a lot about the human brain through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a technique that can yield insight into brain function. Summary: Zooming out to image larger areas of the brain while using fMRI technology allows researchers to capture additional relevant information, offering a better understanding of neural interplay.
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